Forensic analysis of handwritten documents with GRAPHJ

We present GRAPHJ, a forensic tool for handwriting analysis. The proposed tool has been designed to implement the real forensic protocol adopted by the “Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche” of Carabinieri, Italy. GRAPHJ allows the examiner to (1) automatically detect text lines and words in the document, (2) search for a specific character and detect its occurrences in the handwritten text, (3) measure different quantities related to the detected elements (e.g., heights and widths of characters), and (4) generate a report containing measurements, statistics, and the values of all parameters used during the analysis. The generation of the report helps to improve the repeatability of the whole process. The experiments performed on a set of handwritten documents show that GRAPHJ allows one to extract quantitative measures comparable to those acquired manually by an expert examiner. We also report a study on the use of the relative position of the superscript dot of the “i” characters as a parameter to infer the identity of the writer. The study has been performed using GRAPHJ and illustrates its value as a forensic tool.