Transcript Identifying Personality Traits, and Especially Traits Resulting in Violent Behavior through Automatic Handwriting Analysis Janet Fisher, Anish Maredia, Anita Nixon, Nerissa Williams, Evans.

Identifying Personality Traits, and Especially
Traits Resulting in Violent Behavior through
Automatic Handwriting Analysis
Janet Fisher, Anish Maredia, Anita Nixon, Nerissa Williams, Evans lhenchor, Jonathan Leet
Introduction
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Handwriting assessment and analysis has been a traditional
forensic tool for years.
Forensic Writer Identification has been used to verify and/or
authentic the author of a document.
Writer identification is usually performed by human forensic
document experts.
Computer software have become a supplement for experts in
identifying writing samples.
Examples of such systems that have been developed in the past
are FISH, SCRIPT, WANDA, CEDAR-FOX, and Pikaso’s
Write-On.
Objective
The primary objective of this project is to examine what
known technology is available to identify personality traits
(handedness and gender) from handwriting samples. What
do experts say on how accurately handedness and gender
can be determined from handwriting? And what can be
said about determining from handwriting samples whether
a person will commit violent crimes?
Handwriting Motor Skills
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Handwriting is affected by several physiological factors,
including handedness and age.
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Children and older people will demonstrate
differences in fine motor skills compared to healthy
adults. Children's letters tend to be clumsier until they
master the skill.
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Older people often develop muscle or joint issues that
can make their writing look trembled.
Handwriting Personality Traits
There are three basic categories when examining
handwriting:
gradient (slant to the left or right)
structure (evenness of letter size)
concavity (roundedness)
Examples of Personality Traits
ANALYTICAL
THINKING
•Sorts and
separates
information in
assessing their
value, evaluates
information
and supporting
patterns
BLUNT
•Brings matters
to a conclusion
and thrusts it
upon others
CONCENTRATION
• Focuses
attention on
one activity
ignoring all
other
influences
CULTURAL
REFINEMENT
• Integration
and
discriminatio
n of creative
artistic and
structural
systems into
one's mode
of living
A Look At Feminine Handwriting Samples
This is a great cursive example
from a woman who took
penmanship classes to heart.
Note the graceful shape of the
o and s, and the fullness of the
counters.
Look at the rounded open
counters on all the vowels
here. Even though some
letters slant backwards, the
vibe here is “feminine”
because of the curves and size.
This casual style has a
“feminine” feel thanks to the
y, g, n and h.
A Look At Masculine Handwriting Samples
In this case, the m and n shapes have
sharp corners instead of arches. The h
has the same issue. Note how the
lowercase letters have different heights
and, the letters using circles have
different x-heights.
Look at the a and e shapes on this
sample: the counter of the a and the
cramped loop of the e vibe as
“masculine.”
Note the flourishes that start the m, n,
u, y, and w. Those straight lines give
this a “masculine” vibe.
Writing in block capitals like this (no
lowercase letters) is very “masculine.”
Pressing hard with the pen gives these
letters a weight to avoid. The straight
stems and sharp corners add to the
feel.
Male vs. Female
Most English-speaking countries tend to characterize "feminine"
handwriting as neat, even, round, small, ornate and symmetrical.
Handwriting assumed to be "masculine" often gets described as hurried,
uneven, messy, spiky, sloping and bold.
One comparative study in another language suggests that some of these
stereotypes cross over into other cultures and writing systems. [9]
One early study examined "males who write with handwriting judged to
be feminine and vice versa" and concluded their handwriting "is not
reliably associated in these studies with femininity or with sexual
orientation." [16]
Later studies have suggested that most people can discern a writer's sex
with better than chance accuracy.
Related Studies & Works:
Graphology
Research, development and education: It deals with what
happens in our brain and on the way to our writing. These
include experimentation and computer-aided research in the
recognition, comparison, identification and development of
handwriting.
Script-psychology, interpretation of handwriting: It deals
with behavioral and personality profiles.
Forensic comparison and identification: It examines
documents in query and signature to detect authenticity or
forgery. Writing construction, proportions, shape and use of
space are important elements in the analysis.
Related Studies & Works:
Medical Diagnosis
A study in medical diagnosis to find out the
relationship between handwriting and medical
diagnosis was funded by the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development. Littleton
Meeks of Meeks Associates used a computer to analyze
the handwriting of children with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder. This computer-aided diagnosis
tool called Dadisp is supplied and supported by Adept
Scientific. [17]. Study on personality assessment by a
company called Datagraph.
Current State of Technology:
Handwriting Analysis
There are two main tasks in automatic handwritten analysis—
the handwritten text recognition and handwritten signature
verification.
The field of handwriting analysis can be divided into off-line
and on-line: – Off-line (or static) analysis deals with the
recognition of text that is written on a paper-like medium.
In on-line (or dynamic) analysis, the data of a written text are
recorded during writing. Hence, the additional timing
information, i.e. on-line information, of the writing can be
utilized to recognize the written text. [20]
Current State of Technology:
Handwriting Analysis
Questioned document examination which
encompasses forgeries, tracing and disguised
handwritings is currently in a state of upheaval. Courts
in several jurisdictions questioned the scientific basis of
handwriting “identification”. In addition the criteria
for using handwriting comparisons to determine
individualizations are not standardized making
validation of positive identification very difficult. [31]
Computer software programs for matching documents
via handwriting analysis may be able to provide an
objective basis for this type of examination,
Current State of Technology:WANDA
Plug-In concept for WANDA user interface
Screen shot of the WANDA workbench: a
prototype system for writer identification.
WANDA comprises a set of tools for
pre-processing scanned images, semiautomatic and manual feature
extraction, database management,
and writer identification tasks. Using
the WANDA allograph matcher, the
users can manually copy-draw the
trajectory of a scanned handwriting
image.
Current State of Technology:WANDA
The need for longitudinal use
of forensic annotated
handwritten samples require
a stable and open data
representation Extended
Markup Language (XML) has
emerged as an ideal format
Plug-In concept for WANDA user interface
The desirability to frequently
reuse/share used mechanisms
in each new application.
Essentially using a set of
software routines that cover
fundamental mechanism and
need to be extended
accordingly to one or
multiple domain
Models describing the
structure of the data and how
it is processed. [12]
Screen shot of the WANDA workbench: a
prototype system for writer identification.
Current State of Technology: The NEW VSC
Desktop Video Spectral Comparator
An electrostatic detection device, or
EDD, is a specialized piece of equipment
commonly used in questioned document
examination to reveal indentations or
impressions in paper which may
otherwise go unnoticed. It is a nondestructive technique (will not damage
the evidence in question) thus allowing
further tests to be carried out. It is a
sensitive technique capable of detecting
indentations on pages several layers
below the top sheet, and many years after
the indentations were created.
Video Spectral Comparator is the NEW
VSC 6000/HS desktop video spectral
comparator is a comprehensive digital
imaging system providing the questioned
document examiner with an extensive
range of facilities for detecting
irregularities on altered and counterfeit
documents.
Methodology:
L-Z Scale Generator
Automating Lewinson-Zubin scales,
in addition to other techniques, will
uncover metric based abnormalities
that would indicate dimensions of
personality.
L-Z Scale Generator cropping the intended part of the handwriting sample
Lewinson-Zubin Analysis denotes
four special characteristics of
handwriting: vertical, horizontal,
depth, and form. Each letter can be
analyzed by each of these four
characters.
The L-Z analysis can help distinguish
the following dimensions of
personality: the rational, the socialemotional, and the instinctual [20].
Image Display of Handwriting. The above two applets show the image opener
and the display of the loaded image
Automatic Detection of Gender and
Handedness From On-Line Handwriting
On-line handwriting means that temporal information about the
handwriting is available. The handwriting is un-constrained, thus any
text can be used for classification.
Two classifiers are applied to the gender and the handedness
classification problem. The first classifier uses Gaussian Mixture
Models (GMMs) to model the classes, while the second approach is
based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs).
The experiments have been conducted on the IAM-OnDB, a large online handwriting database acquired from a whiteboard [21]. This
database consists of data from more than 200 writers with eight
handwritten texts per writer. Each text consists of seven text lines on
average.
Automatic Detection of Gender and
Handedness From On-Line Handwriting
The classification task is to identify the correct gender or
handedness for a given text line. For the task of gender
classification we randomly selected 50 male and 50 female
writers for training the classifiers and 25 other writers of each
group for testing. For the task of handedness classification we
used less data for training and recognition because there are
only 20 left-handed writers in the database.
The forms of 15 randomly selected left-handed writers and 15
randomly selected right-handed writers have been used for
training and the remaining 5 left-handed and 5 other righthanded writers have been used for testing. This assures that
both classes are equally distributed in both the training and the
test set.
Conclusions
A study was done for the purpose of identifying personality traits
through automatic handwriting analysis and the current technology
available for such process. Identification of personality traits through
handwriting samples can be done both by humans and by machines.
In this study we covered topics that can be determined from
handwriting samples-gender, handedness, education, age, country, all
of which are useful in forensics- by using different current state-of-the
art technologies. Our work has employed different handwriting
features some used in forensics.
We need an automated handwriting system to extend the research
presented in this paper, because the current technology is insufficient,
and human research in the field could be further validated with this
solution.
Future Work
•Each handwriting sample will be run through the Java application. Based on the L-Z scale
analysis application we will determine whether there appears to have any consistency
amongst all the samples of violent offenders.
•Measurements or metrics that seem to grow more significant as the offenders become more
violent will be determined. Extending a program that will analyze samples and find these
characteristics in an individual’s handwriting. Coupled with analysis done in the
application, we should be able to determine if any of the researched characteristics which
demonstrate a potential for violence.
•The best place to start is by getting the application running (the .jar file in the dist
directory) reading the material already presented, finding new research on personality traits
that violent offenders share and what handwriting characteristics are indicative of those
personality traits. From that, we should be able to establish conclusions on whether we feel
this is a possible method for personality assessment.