Quantitative Assessment of the Discriminative Power of Handwriting

This project will extend previously developed computational approaches to handwritten questioned document (QD) examination previously funded by NIJ (2004-IJ-CX-K050). The proposed work under this cooperative agreement will focus on (i) development of a nine-point scale ranging from identified as same to identified as different, so that the software results will correlate with the opinions of QD examiners; (ii) improving automatic writer verification performance by removing a feature independence assumption; (iii) expanding the signature verification module to allow for multiple signature types and providing tools for automatic signature extraction from complex backgrounds; and (iv) studying disguised writing to see if any patterns emerge using computational techniques. The proposed tasks will be done with the guidance and assistance of forensic QD examiners.

nca/ncf