Color separation to facilitate handwriting examination

Often the forensic document examiners encounter cases where the ink of handwriting interferes with other writings. In these cases, a serious problem is to distinguish and to separate the different color components. The purpose of this paper is shows an image processing method that could accomplish this task without use of expensive material/equipment or to solve cases in which even high level technical instrumentation (IR absorption or luminescence) does not provide good results. In the proposed system one user can choose more than one point for each different color component, respectively desired, undesirable and background. The results obtained with our color separation methods to specific color combinations (i.e. handwriting ink/handwriting ink and handwriting ink/rubber stamp ink) show that the effect of the intersecting ink may indeed be minimized if not canceled altogether.