Assessment of the stability and usefulness of some handwriting features used by document examiners

Abstract

In this paper we examine the stability of a total of 40 different structural features extracted from four different letters ("y", "d", "f" and "t" ). The one-way analysis of variance (Anova) was used to examine the stability of these features on 3077 samples of letters from 30 different writers. It is concluded that a number of these features exhibit sufficient stability to be useful for handwriting style extraction. With further analysis of features from other letters. and improvement in the measure of such features as loops, it is likely that the features can provide some quantitative measure of the likely authorship of a questioned document.