Role of Automation in the Examination of Handwritten Items

During the last few years the pattern analysis and machine intelligence community has developed automation tools for forensic document examination (FDE), in particular for determining whether a given handwriting specimen can be attributed to known writing. As with other expert systems, such as for medical diagnosis, current automation tools are useful only as part of a larger manually-intensive procedure. Defining a computational approach for the overall problem not only places these tools in context but also helps validate and improve existing manual procedures. We consider the standard work flow in FDE of handwritten items and annotate the steps where automation is available or possible. A well-known ransom note case is considered as an example, where there are multiple questioned documents, testing for multiple writers of the same document, determining whether the writing is disguised, known writing is formal while questioned writing is informal, etc. The findings for the particular ransom note case using the tools are given. Observations are made for developing a more fully automated approach to FDE.