Handwriting Copybook Style Identification for Questioned Document Examination

Handwriting originates from a particular copybook style such as Palmer or Zaner-Bloser that one learns in childhood. Since questioned document examination plays an important investigative and forensic role in many types of crime, it is important to develop a system that helps objectively identify a questioned document’s handwriting style. Here, we propose a computer vision system that can assist a document examiner in the identification of a writer’s handwriting style and therefore the origin or nationality of an unknown writer of a questioned document. We collected 33 English alphabet copybook styles from 18 countries. Each character in a questioned document is segmented and matched against all of the 33 handwriting copybook styles. The more characters present in the questioned document, the higher the accuracy observed.