Citation/Abstract

Questioned document examination plays an important investigative and forensic role in many types of crime. For a ransom note or forgery, writer identification is the main goal. As an intermediate step towards writer identification, this dissertation presents a procedure for document examiners to determine the copybook style of a questioned document. Determining the copybook style helps to narrow the suspect population of the writer. The procedure uses a combination of pseudo-online data, the SDSS (Stroke Direction Sequence String) features, and the modified Levenshtein edit distance to obtain similarity matching scores. A second part of this dissertation focuses on cluster analysis of the pseudo-online copybook style database to determine what styles are similar. The resulting clusters group the similar copybook styles and indicate some geographic groupings.