First International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting

PREFACE Handwriting is considered as a representative of human behavior and characteristics since centuries. With the evolution of modern computing technologies, researchers have moved towards the automated analysis of handwriting. The shift towards automated analysis of handwriting has even fortified by the interest various industries have in this field. One of the most important applications of automated handwriting analysis systems is in forensic environments. Up till now, most of the forensic cases of handwriting analysis are solved without actual application of automated systems. This is because there is an ever increasing gap between the demands of Forensic Handwriting Experts (FHEs) and the computer science community. Actually the underlying issue is the incapability of most of the state of the art handwriting examination systems to be directly applicable to the forensic cases. This is because the computer science community in general has moved by considering the cases which are either trivial w.r.t. forensic situations or not considered the needs of FHEs. Thus there is a great demand to bring the forensic experts and the computer science experts under one roof. It is a novel approach of bringing together researchers in the field of automated handwriting analysis and signature verification and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. It is organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorial. On the first day, an introductory tutorial on forensic handwriting examination is given. This includes a description of the forensics point of view and examples of real casework as well as a summary of important approaches in the area of automated handwriting examination. The major topics include: how forensic experts make comparisons (similarities versus differences, subjectivity and bias), natural variation, line quality, quality versus quantity; what forensic experts need from the document analysis community; what the document analysis community needs to understand about FHEs work; existing systems and system problems; Quite some attention will be paid to the Bayesian approach to forensic evidence evaluation (i.e. using the Likelihood Ratios a measure of the strength of evidence), and reporting by means of a verbal conclusion scale. On the second day, the AFHA workshop is organized. This volume contains the proceedings of AFHA workshop. Nine submissions were received and after a single-blind-peer review process, eight papers were accepted for this volume. In particular, the paper entitled 'Non-English and Non-Latin Signature Verification Systems: A Survey' is the first one in this volume as it provides a detailed …