Detecting Forged Handwriting with Wavelets and Statistics

For centuries, the forgeries of great artists have held a place of fascination in the public eye. Museums occasionally contain entire galleries dedicated to those forgeries which are considered to be “museum quality.” People such as Hans van Meegeren and Elmyr de Hory have created such masterful imitations of the works of Johannes Vermeer, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso that they have become famous for their ability to deceive art critics and historians [5, 8]. As these imitators have been discovered by different methods of analysis, the following questions arise: