EAGER: Automatic Identification of Writer Accent and Script Influences in Handwriting

This innovative project proposes to explore new hypotheses with respect to analysis of handwriting by examining and analyzing the written works of native and non-native writers of a particular script or alphabet. One hypothesis to be explored is that handwriting can be taken as analogous to speech in the sense that emphases might be indicated in the script itself without special notation. A second hypothesis is that an individual's handwriting is a mixture of style influences that can be decomposed into identifiable constituents. Insight into these issues could result in expansion of our ability to identify important aspects of written works that could benefit research and applications in a variety of disciplines including computing and computational sciences, forensics, biometrics and also the humanities. Humanists would gain powerful new tools and interfaces for analyzing large collections of handwritten documents in many alphabets and scripts and thus be able to ascertain critical information of use in such tasks as chronological ordering, categorization, determination of geographic origins, etc. A number of scripts and alphabets will be included in the research including Arabic, Oriental scripts, Roman and numerous others with significant feature differences.