Role of automation in the examination of handwritten items

Several automation tools have been developed over the years for forensic document examination (FDE) of handwritten items. Integrating the developed tools into a unified framework is considered and the essential role of the human in the process is discussed. The task framework is developed by considering the approach of computational thinking whose components are abstraction, algorithms, mathematical models and ability to scale. Beginning with the human FDE procedure expressed in algorithmic form, mathematical and software implementations of individual steps of the algorithm are described. Advantages of the framework are discussed, including efficiency (ability to scale to tasks with many handwritten items), reproducibility and validation/improvement of existing manual procedures. It is indicated that as with other expert systems, such as for medical diagnosis, current automation tools are useful only as part of a larger manually intensive procedure. This viewpoint is illustrated with a well-known FDE case, concerning the Lindbergh kidnapping with a new hypothesis - in this case, there are multiple questioned documents, possibility of multiple writers of the same document, determining whether the writing is disguised, known writing is formal while questioned writing is informal, etc. Observations are made for future developments, where human examiners provide handwriting characteristics while computational methods provide the necessary statistical analysis.