Differentiating Pen Inks in Handwritten Bank Cheques Using Multi-layer Perceptron

Abstract

In handwritten Bank cheques, addition of new words using similar color pen can cause huge loss. Hence, it is important to differentiate pen ink used in these types of documents. In this work, we propose a non-destructive pen ink differentiation method using statistical features of ink and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier. Large sample of blue and black pen ink is acquired from 112 Bank cheque leaves, written by nine different volunteers using fourteen different blue and black pens. Handwritten words are extracted from scanned cheque images manually. Pen ink pixels are identified using K-means binarization. Fifteen statistical features from each color handwritten words are extracted and are used to formulate the problem as a binary classification problem. MLP classifier is used to train the model for differentiating pen ink in handwritten Bank cheques. The proposed method performs efficiently on both known and unknown pen samples with an average accuracy of 94.6% and 93.5% respectively. We have compared the proposed method with other existing method to show its efficiency.