Handwriting writer recognition: Think for a moment that you just woke up 1000 years ago; normally we wake up the next day right?
But for some reason something extraordinary happened and your universe took a U-turn and you ended up in the 5th century. Shockingly, you find this fine, the air is pure, the temperature is comforting, and you realize these times are actually better.
After a few minutes, you are so desperate to share your experience with your best friend who is 50 miles away but you cannot. No cell phones, no internet, all the things and ways you knew to share your experience with your friend are just gone.
But then you see something, you see a way to share your experience with your friend and its by handwritten letter or message which can be delivered by someone heading that way. Your friend immediately recognized your handwriting and even replied you at the end of the day.
Today we will the change the way you view handwriting. From today onwards you will be able to notice tiny little details hidden in the handwriting and make some very impressive observations, if you do it right. Revolutionists thought the importance of handwriting will fade away in the modern era but this is not the case.
Handwriting is still an important aspect of a person. If we just focus hard enough and know what to look for, we can reveal many hidden aspects of the personality of a person just by looking at their handwriting. Just like it is said our eyes speak only the truth and are unable to hide it, in the same manner, handwriting also tells the truth but is now supported by scientific studies, experiments and practical applications.
Psychologists and crime investigating agencies have been using handwriting as a tool to identify different concealed aspects of personalities such as their emotional state at the time they hand wrote on that piece of paper. They call it graphology which is the study of handwriting to reveal aspects of personality and even identify the writer.
From a Suicide note found at the crime scene, now a days forensic experts can assess the handwriting and are able to reveal shocking details, such as, whether the writer actually had suicidal motive or was this just staged to mislead them?
They get all these clues by using principles of graphology and their practical knowledge and education in this specialty. The only problem with this technique is that it is “text dependent”. What do I mean by this? they need the actual circumstantial text of the respect situation for example in a suicide case, the suicide note to assess and then give their review about the findings.
Ever been to a bank to cash a cheque? The banker identifies the person and authenticates that the signature is original or not. By the signature he proves or disproves the cheque was written by the concerned person.
You noticed how handwriting in the signature was used to for identification of the writer. There is another term “verification”, here we have two handwritten samples hand we try to tell whether these two samples were written by the same person or not.
Now you should really focus because we are about to discuss some very important facts about how handwriting can tell things to us which are hidden elsewise. Andrea McNichole An expert graphologist from Los Angeles has been studying handwriting for 40 years now and shares her experience by some very interesting facts.
For those of you who don’t know her she gave her expert advice and testimony on Howard Hughes’s will and the Billionaire Boys Club murder with her professional handwriting analysis. She was also an consultant in Hitler diaries analysis.
She shares her experience by telling us that when we see an abnormally large spaces in between two words, we immediately know that the writer lost spontaneity, but kept on moving his hand to the right. She gave an example why would somebody would take a moment or hesitate a little before writing their age its usually because their lying about it.
While emphasizing over the importance of handwriting analysis in writer recognition she also shared a shocking incidence from her practice a forensic case, where a graphoanalyst diagnosed a lady as suffering from heart problems simply because she had a glitch and abnormality in the upstroke and grapheme of the letter H in her handwriting.
The graphoanalyst was convinced that, unconsciously, letter H forced anxiety in the lady, and that this agitation exhibited physically. Now that is amazing it helped the forensics solve that case.
How forensic experts work in handwriting analysis? Their approach is a little complex they use algorithms, edit distance and graphemes and then provide their expert opinion in the handwriting analysis. We will take a peek in these techniques just to have a simple understanding.
A worldwide concept of string similarity is the edit distance, which is the least number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions which are needed to fully change one string into the other and the other thing under the same heading is Levenshtein distance, Forensic experts have a thorough knowledge and experience in using this technique for expert handwriting analysis.
Graphemes are generally defined as the written representation of phonemes. For example, the word “BREAD” is composed of the four phonemes which are /b/, /r/, /e/ and /d/, and accordingly, of the four graphemes ‘B’, ‘R’, ‘EA’, and ‘D’.
Graphemes are in this manner designated as the minimal ‘functional bridges’ in the basis and mapping between orthography and phonology. These are expert technique and require years of training and experience to master them.
Handwriting will always be a part of our lives and continue to reveal astonishing things about us as more and more research is now being done in this arena. A day will come when this will be fully functional system of identification and verification.
Imagine you don’t need your ID card and driving license or credit card to be present with you to use it just using your handwriting to give identification and your sign to buy something you want.
Authors: Iqra Jabeen from Department of Mathematics , Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore.