Writer Identification Using Inexpensive Signal Processing Techniques

We propose to use novel and classical audio and text signal-processing and otherwise techniques for "inexpensive" fast writer identification tasks of scanned hand-written documents "visually". The "inexpensive" refers to the efficiency of the identification process in terms of CPU cycles while preserving decent accuracy for preliminary identification. This is a comparative study of multiple algorithm combinations in a pattern recognition pipeline implemented in Java around an open-source Modular Audio Recognition Framework (MARF) that can do a lot more beyond audio. We present our preliminary experimental findings in such an identification task. We simulate "visual" identification by "looking" at the hand-written document as a whole rather than trying to extract fine-grained features out of it prior classification.Comment: 9 pages; 1 figure; presented at CISSE'09 at http://conference.cisse2009.org/proceedings.aspx ; includes the the application source code; based on MARF described in arXiv:0905.123

Biografo: An integrated tool for forensic writer identification

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20125-2_17The design and performance of a practical integrated tool for writer identification in forensic scenarios is presented. The tool has been designed to help forensic examiners along the complete identification process: from the data acquisition to the recognition itself, as well as with the management of large writer-related databases. The application has been implemented using JavaScript running over a relational database which provides the whole system with some very desirable and unique characteristics such as the possibility to perform all type of queries (e.g., find individuals with some very discriminative character, find a specific document, display all the samples corresponding to one writer, etc.), or a complete control over the set of parameters we want to use in a specific recognition task (e.g., users in the database to be used as control set, set of characters to be used in the identification, size of the ranked list we want as final result, etc.). The identification performance of the tool is evaluated on a real-case forensic database showing some very promising results.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Dirección General de la Guardia Civil, and projects Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485) from CAM, Bio-Challenge (TEC2009-11186) from Spanish MICINN, BBfor2 (ITN-2008-238803) from the European Commision, and Cátedra UAM-Telefónica

An examination of quantitative methods for Forensic Signature Analysis and the admissibility of signature verification system as legal evidence.

The experiments described in this thesis deal with handwriting characteristics which are involved in the production of forged and genuine signatures and complexity of signatures. The objectives of this study were (1) to provide su?cient details on which of the signature characteristics are easier to forge, (2) to investigate the capabilities of the signature complexity formula given by Found et al. based on a different signature database provided by University of Kent. This database includes the writing movements of 10 writers producing their genuine signature and of 140 writers forging these sample signatures. Using the 150 genuine signatures without constrictions of the Kent’s database an evaluation of the complexity formula suggested in Found et al took place divided the signature in three categories low, medium and high graphical complexity. The results of the formula implementation were compared with the opinions of three leading professional forensic document examiners employed by Key Forensics in the UK. The analysis of data for Study I reveals that there is not ample evidence that high quality forgeries are possible after training. In addition, a closer view of the kinematics of the forging writers is responsible for our main conclusion, that forged signatures are widely different from genuine especially in the kinematic domain. From all the parameters used in this study 11 out of 15 experienced significant changes when the comparison of the two groups (genuine versus forged signature) took place and gave a clear picture of which parameters can assist forensic document examiners and can be used by them to examine the signatures forgeries. The movements of the majority of forgers are signi?cantly slower than those of authentic writers. It is also clearly recognizable that the majority of forgers perform higher levels of pressure when trying to forge the genuine signature. The results of Study II although limited and not entirely consistent with the study of Found that proposed this model, indicate that the model can provide valuable objective evidence (regarding complex signatures) in the forensic environment and justify its further investigation but more work is need to be done in order to use this type of models in the court of law. The model was able to predict correctly only 53% of the FDEs opinion regarding the complexity of the signatures. Apart from the above investigations in this study there will be also a reference at the debate which has started in recent years that is challenging the validity of forensic handwriting experts’ skills and at the effort which has begun by interested parties of this sector to validate and standardise the field of forensic handwriting examination and a discussion started. This effort reveals that forensic document analysis field meets all factors which were set by Daubert ruling in terms of theory proven, education, training, certification, falsifiability, error rate, peer review and publication, general acceptance. However innovative methods are needed for the development of forensic document analysis discipline. Most modern and effective solution in order to prevent observational and emotional bias would be the development of an automated handwriting or signature analysis system. This system will have many advantages in real cases scenario. In addition the significant role of computer-assisted handwriting analysis in the daily work of forensic document examiners (FDE) or the judicial system is in agreement with the assessment of the National Research Council of United States that “the scientific basis for handwriting comparison needs to be strengthened”, however it seems that further research is required in order to be able these systems to reach the accomplishment point of this objective and overcome legal obstacles presented in this study

Writer identification approach based on bag of words with OBI features

Handwriter identification aims to simplify the task of forensic experts by providing them with semi-automated tools in order to enable them to narrow down the search to determine the final identification of an unknown handwritten sample. An identification algorithm aims to produce a list of predicted writers of the unknown handwritten sample ranked in terms of confidence measure metrics for use by the forensic expert will make the final decision. Most existing handwriter identification systems use either statistical or model-based approaches. To further improve the performances this paper proposes to deploy a combination of both approaches using Oriented Basic Image features and the concept of graphemes codebook. To reduce the resulting high dimensionality of the feature vector a Kernel Principal Component Analysis has been used. To gauge the effectiveness of the proposed method a performance analysis, using IAM dataset for English handwriting and ICFHR 2012 dataset for Arabic handwriting, has been carried out. The results obtained achieved an accuracy of 96% thus demonstrating its superiority when compared against similar techniques

Dissimilarity Gaussian Mixture Models for Efficient Offline Handwritten Text-Independent Identification using SIFT and RootSIFT Descriptors

Handwriting biometrics is the science of identifying the behavioural aspect of an individual’s writing style and exploiting it to develop automated writer identification and verification systems. This paper presents an efficient handwriting identification system which combines Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and RootSIFT descriptors in a set of Gaussian mixture models (GMM). In particular, a new concept of similarity and dissimilarity Gaussian mixture models (SGMM and DGMM) is introduced. While a SGMM is constructed for every writer to describe the intra-class similarity that is exhibited between the handwritten texts of the same writer, a DGMM represents the contrast or dissimilarity that exists between the writer’s style on one hand and other different handwriting styles on the other hand. Furthermore, because the handwritten text is described by a number of key point descriptors where each descriptor generates a SGMM/DGMM score, a new weighted histogram method is proposed to derive the intermediate prediction score for each writer’s GMM. The idea of weighted histogram exploits the fact that handwritings from the same writer should exhibit more similar textual patterns than dissimilar ones, hence, by penalizing the bad scores with a cost function, the identification rate can be significantly enhanced. Our proposed system has been extensively assessed using six different public datasets (including three English, two Arabic and one hybrid language) and the results have shown the superiority of the proposed system over state-of-the-art techniques

Off-line Arabic Character-Based Writer Identification – a Survey

Off-line writer identification requires transferring the text under consideration into an image file. This represents the only available solution to bring the printed materials to the electronic media. However, the transferring process causes the system to lose the temporal information of that text, which it can be gathered in  on-line writer identification. Various techniques have been implemented to achieve high identification rates. These techniques have tackled different aspects of the identification system. Importance of writer identification system is to help mainly in forensic fields, historical document analysis and  handwriting recognition system enhancement. Unfortunately, the Arabic writer identification system not achieves a satisfaction rate yet whereas certain process of features and classification still not recognized