The design and functionality of a versatile search engine on handwritten documents is described. Documents are indexed using global image features, e.g., stroke width, slant, word gaps, as well local features that describe shapes of characters and words. Image indexing is done automatically using page analysis, page segmentation, line separation, word segmentation and recognition of characters and words. Several types of searches are

Since handwriting is influenced by physiology, training and other behavioral factors, a study of the handwriting of twins can shed light on the individuality of handwriting. The paper describes the methodology and results of such a study where handwriting samples of twins were compared by an automatic handwriting verification system. The results complement that of a previous study where a diverse population was used. The present study involves samples of 206 pairs of twins, where each sample consisted of a page of handwriting. The verification task was to determine whether two half-page documents (where the original samples were divided into upper and lower halves) were written by the same individual. For twins there were 1236 verification cases – including 824 tests where the textual content of writing was different and 412 tests where it was the same. An additional set of 1,648 test cases were obtained from handwriting samples of non-twins (general population). In order to make the handwriting comparison, the system computed macro features (overall pictorial attributes), micro features (characteristics of individual letters) , and style features (characteristics of whole-word shapes and letter pairs). Four testing scenarios were evaluated: twins and non-twins writing the same text and writing different texts. Results of the verification tests

Forensic document examination is at a cross-roads due to challenges posed to its scientific basis as well as due to the availability of revolutionary computer methods. This paper surveys recent efforts in the areas of establishing a scientific basis of forensic handwriting examination, software tools to assist document examiners and software systems that automate some of the examination process. This includes tools that compute features and provide visualization to assist the document examiner, verification methods to provide the degree of match between a questioned and known document, identification methods that narrow-down the search from a repository of documents with known writers, and software architectures that allow a variety of forensic tools to be integrated. I.