Individuality of handwritten characters

Abstract

Analysis of handwritten characters (allographs) plays animportant role in forensic document examination. However,so far there lacks a comprehensive and quantitative study onindividuality of handwritten characters. Based on a largenumber of handwritten characters extracted from handwritingsamples of 1000 individuals in US, the individuality ofhandwritten characters has been quantitatively measuredthrough identification and verification models. Our studyshows that in general alphabetic characters bear more individualitythan numerals and use of a certain number ofcharacters will significantly outperform the global featuresof handwriting samples in handwriting identification andverification. Moreover, the quantitative measurement ofdiscriminative powers of characters offers a general guidancefor selecting most-informative characters in examiningforensic documents.