Biometric authentication based on 2D/3D sensing of forensic handwriting traces

Handwriting represents an important modality in both biometric and forensic domains. while the first field appears to be a well-studied area with many approaches for acquisition, feature extraction and classification, the latter is rather novel with respect to digitised, automated methods. In prior works, authors of this article have shown that forensic handwriting traces can be processed by means of high-resolution 2D/3D surficial scanners. These devices allow the acquisition at a vertical resolution down to a few nanometres. Pre-processing methods have been identified, which allow for spatial segmentation of writing traces and for de-noising of 2D and 3D data, leading to a clear visual enhancement of the writing traces based on topography information. Further, authors have suggested a novel benchmarking method for forensic trace analysis based on feature sets originally suggested for biometric handwriting and comparing the forensic recognition performance by means of equal error rates, achieved from biometric sensors and forensic 2D/3D sensors in parallel. This article summarises and extents these works in two main aspects: on one side, it presents significantly extended experiments with respect to test set size and feature sets utilised for classification. On the other side, authors suggest new optimisation approaches to the segmentation algorithm.