Study of forensic features used for English script and their applicability to Bengali script

Abstract

An experiment reported at ICDAR in 2003 described a quantative measure of individuality of handwritten characters and reports on samples collected from 1000 United States writers writing in English. However, application of a similar approach on handwriting from a set of 20 writers of an Indic script (Bengali or Bangala) results in a poor performance while measuring individuality. This paper describes that experiment and reports results which raise some crucial questions regarding the effectiveness of analyzing handwritten characters to measure individuality in a script independent manner.