Comparison of historical documents for writership

Gregory R. Ball; Danjun Pu; Roger Stritmatter; Sargur N Srihari

doi:10.1117/12.839923

18 January 2010 Comparison of historical documents for writership

Gregory R. Ball, Danjun Pu, Roger Stritmatter, Sargur N Srihari

Proceedings Volume 7534, Document Recognition and Retrieval XVII; 75340P (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.839923
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2010, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

Over the last century forensic document science has developed progressively more sophisticated pattern recognition methodologies for ascertaining the authorship of disputed documents. These include advances not only in computer assisted stylometrics, but forensic handwriting analysis. We present a writer verification method and an evaluation of an actual historical document written by an unknown writer. The questioned document is compared against two known handwriting samples of Herman Melville, a 19th century American author who has been hypothesized to be the writer of this document. The comparison led to a high confidence result that the questioned document was written by the same writer as the known documents. Such methodology can be applied to many such questioned documents in historical writing, both in literary and legal fields.

Citation Download Citation

Gregory R. Ball, Danjun Pu, Roger Stritmatter, and Sargur N Srihari "Comparison of historical documents for writership", Proc. SPIE 7534, Document Recognition and Retrieval XVII, 75340P (18 January 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.839923

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