George Mason University
CDS/CCDS/Statistics Colloquium Series
Seminar Announcement


Handwriting Identification: Identifying the Writer of a Questioned Document Using Statistical Analysis

Donald Gantz and John Miller

Department of Applied Information Technology and Department of Statistics
George Mason University


Research 1, Room 301, Fairfax Campus
George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030

Time: 10:30 a.m. Refreshments, 10:45 a.m. Colloquium Talk
Date: November 16, 2007



ABSTRACT

The speakers are co-principal investigators in the Volgenau School’s Document Forensics Laboratory. One of the technologies they have developed involves the identification of the unknown writer of a questioned handwritten document from among a population of writers, who have handwriting samples in a database. They will explain how they have designed a system based on applying discriminant analysis in a novel manner to solve this handwriting identification problem. Graph theory is used to quantify handwritten characters yielding high-dimensional feature vectors capturing physical information for the characters. The statistical methodology selects and utilizes a small number of discriminating measurements from the high-dimensional feature vector. They will demonstrate the surprising writer identification power possible using very few lower-case letters of the alphabet.