Forensic document examination: Who is the writer?

Abstract

This work presents a baseline system to automatic handwriting identification based only on graphometric features. Initially a set composed of 12 features was presented and its extraction process demonstrated. In order to evaluate the efficiency of these features, a selection process was applied, and a smaller group composed only of 4 features (GS = Goodness Subset) present the best writer identification rates. Experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the performance, individually and in group, of the graphometric features; and to identify the number of writers that significantly affect the accuracy of the system. The accuracy of the system applied to 100 different writers taking account the GS features set were 84% (TOP1), 96% (TOP5) and 98% (TOP10). These results are comparable to others in the literature on graphometric features. It can be observed that gradually the relation between the number of writers and accuracy is stabilized, and with 200 writers the results are maintained.