Variations of handwritten signatures with time: A sigma-lognormal analysis

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. M. Gómez-Barrero, J. Galbally, J. Fiérrez, J. Ortega-García, "Variations of handwritten signatures with time: A sigma-lognormal analysis" in 6th International Conference on Biometrics (ICB), Madrid (Spain), 2013, 1-6The variation of dynamic signatures with time is analysed for the first time using the Kinematic Theory, following a general, consistent and fully reproducible protocol. Experiments are carried out on a new long-term database captured in 6 sessions uniformly distributed over a 15 month time span, under almost identical conditions. Signatures are represented with the Sigma Log-Normal model, which takes into account the effects of body ageing closely related to handwriting, such as neuromuscular response times. After studying the evolution of signatures with time, an analysis on age groups based on the model parameters is carried out.This work has been partially supported by projects Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485) from CAM, Bio-Challenge (TEC2009-11186) and Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881) from Spanish MINECO, Guardia Civil, Cátedra UAM-Telefónica and grant RGPIN-915 from NSERC Canada

Dynamic signatures: A review of dynamic feature variation and forensic methodology

This article focuses on dynamic signatures and their features. It provides a detailed and critical review of dynamic feature variations and circumstantial parameters affecting dynamic signatures. The state of the art summarizes available knowledge, meant to assist the forensic practitioner in cases presenting extraordinary writing conditions. The studied parameters include hardware-related issues, aging and the influence of time, as well as physical and mental states of the writer. Some parameters, such as drug and alcohol abuse or medication, have very strong effects on handwriting and signature dynamics. Other conditions such as the writer’s posture and fatigue have been found to affect feature variation less severely. The need for further research about the influence of these parameters, as well as handwriting dynamics in general is highlighted. These factors are relevant to the examiner in the assessment of the probative value of the reported features. Additionally, methodology for forensic examination of dynamic signatures is discussed. Available methodology and procedures are reviewed, while pointing out major technical and methodological advances in the field of forensic handwriting examination. The need for sharing the best practice manuals, standard operating procedures and methodologies to favor further progress is accentuated

Graphonomics and your Brain on Art, Creativity and Innovation : Proceedings of the 19th International Graphonomics Conference (IGS 2019 – Your Brain on Art)

[Italiano]: “Grafonomia e cervello su arte, creatività e innovazione”. Un forum internazionale per discutere sui recenti progressi nell'interazione tra arti creative, neuroscienze, ingegneria, comunicazione, tecnologia, industria, istruzione, design, applicazioni forensi e mediche. I contributi hanno esaminato lo stato dell'arte, identificando sfide e opportunità, e hanno delineato le possibili linee di sviluppo di questo settore di ricerca. I temi affrontati includono: strategie integrate per la comprensione dei sistemi neurali, affettivi e cognitivi in ambienti realistici e complessi; individualità e differenziazione dal punto di vista neurale e comportamentale; neuroaesthetics (uso delle neuroscienze per spiegare e comprendere le esperienze estetiche a livello neurologico); creatività e innovazione; neuro-ingegneria e arte ispirata dal cervello, creatività e uso di dispositivi di mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) indossabili; terapia basata su arte creativa; apprendimento informale; formazione; applicazioni forensi. / [English]: “Graphonomics and your brain on art, creativity and innovation”. A single track, international forum for discussion on recent advances at the intersection of the creative arts, neuroscience, engineering, media, technology, industry, education, design, forensics, and medicine. The contributions reviewed the state of the art, identified challenges and opportunities and created a roadmap for the field of graphonomics and your brain on art. The topics addressed include: integrative strategies for understanding neural, affective and cognitive systems in realistic, complex environments; neural and behavioral individuality and variation; neuroaesthetics (the use of neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level); creativity and innovation; neuroengineering and brain-inspired art, creative concepts and wearable mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) designs; creative art therapy; informal learning; education; forensics

A study of the effects of ageing on the characteristics of handwriting and signatures

The work presented in this thesis is focused on the understanding of factors that are unique to the elderly and their use of biometric systems. In particular, an investigation is carried out with a focus on the handwritten signature as the biometric modality of choice. This followed on from an in-depth analysis of various biometric modalities such as voice, fingerprint and face. This analysis aimed at investigating the inclusivity of and the policy guiding the use of biometrics by the elderly. Knowledge gained from extracted features of the handwritten signatures of the elderly shed more light on and exposed the uniqueness of some of these features in their ability to separate the elderly from the young. Consideration is also given to a comparative analysis of another handwriting task, that of copying text both in cursive and block capitals. It was discovered that there are features that are unique to each task. Insight into the human perceptual capability in inspecting signatures, in assessing complexity and in judging imitations was gained by analysing responses to practical scenarios that applied human perceptual judgement. Features extracted from a newly created database containing handwritten signatures donated by elderly subjects allowed the possibility of analysing the intra-class variations that exist within the elderly population

A New Swarm-Based Framework for Handwritten Authorship Identification in Forensic Document Analysis

Feature selection has become the focus of research area for a long time due to immense consumption of high-dimensional data. Originally, the purpose of feature selection is to select the minimally sized subset of features class distribution which is as close as possible to original class distribution. However in this chapter, feature selection is used to obtain the unique individual significant features which are proven very important in handwriting analysis of Writer Identification domain. Writer Identification is one of the areas in pattern recognition that have created a center of attention by many researchers to work in due to the extensive exchange of paper documents. Its principal point is in forensics and biometric application as such the writing style can be used as bio-metric features for authenticating the identity of a writer. Handwriting style is a personal to individual and it is implicitly represented by unique individual significant features that are hidden in individual’s handwriting. These unique features can be used to identify the handwritten authorship accordingly. The use of feature selection as one of the important machine learning task is often disregarded in Writer Identification domain, with only a handful of studies implemented feature selection phase. The key concern in Writer Identification is in acquiring the features reflecting the author of handwriting. Thus, it is an open question whether the extracted features are optimal or near-optimal to identify the author. Therefore, feature extraction and selection of the unique individual significant features are very important in order to identify the writer, moreover to improve the classification accuracy. It relates to invarianceness of authorship where invarianceness between features for intra-class (same writer) is lower than inter-class (different writer). Many researches have been done to develop algorithms for extracting good features that can reflect the authorship with good performance. This chapter instead focuses on identifying the unique individual significant features of word shape by using feature selection method prior the identification task. In this chapter, feature selection is explored in order to find the most unique individual significant features which are the unique features of individual’s writing. This chapter focuses on the integration of Swarm Optimized and Computationally Inexpensive Floating Selection (SOCIFS) feature selection technique into the proposed hybrid of Writer Identification framework 386 S.F. Pratama et al. and feature selection framework, namely Cheap Computational Cost Class-Specific Swarm Sequential Selection (C4S4). Experiments conducted to proof the validity and feasibility of the proposed framework using dataset from IAM Database by comparing the proposed framework to the existing Writer Identification framework and various feature selection techniques and frameworks yield satisfactory results. The results show the proposed framework produces the best result with 99.35% classification accuracy. The promising outcomes are opening the gate to future explorations in Writer Identification domain specifically and other domains generally