Welcome to the First International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis (AFHA-2011)


We are pleased to announce the 1st Int. Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis to be held as a satellite workshop of the ICDAR 2011 in Beijing, China during September 17-18, 2011. The AFHA 2011 is a novel approach of bringing together researchers in the field of automated handwriting analysis and signature verification and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. It is organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorial.

On the first day, an introductory tutorial on forensic handwriting examination will be given. This includes a description of the forensics point of view and examples of real casework as well as a summary of important approaches in the area of automated handwriting examination.

On the second day, a workshop about recent research activities will be held. First, Participants with accepted report papers will get the opportunity to talk about their research. Subsequently, in a panel discussion session, all participants will be able to state their points of view and discuss together about selected topics of the community. This unique combination of tutorial and workshop will be beneficial for newcomers in that field, as well as for persons who have interesting ongoing research results and want to discuss about them and other topics in a broad group consisting of experts from the document analysis field as well as experts from the forensic handwriting examination community.

Every registration is for the combined workshop/tutorial.

Coverage of Topics

We encourage the participants to submit reports (up to 5 pages, IEEE format ) on ongoing research as well as papers on novel directions in the following fields:


o Forensic handwriting verification/identification
o Forensic signature verification/identification
o Strength of evidence: Bayesian statistics/networks
o Within writer versus between writer variations
o Determining the frequency of occurrence of handwriting features
o Automated signature identification and verification
o Automated handwriting identification and verification
o Extraction of movement order features out of the ink trace
o Expert results vs. system outputs
o Allograph matching and clustering
o Classification of signatures: legible vs. illegible, complex vs. simple
o Taxonomy of features


The proceedings will be made available electronically as Open Access on the web before the workshop starts


Important Dates

Paper Submission: June 15, 2011
Acceptance Notification: July 15, 2011
Camera-Ready Submission: August 15, 2011

Proceedings Publication Format:
Electronic and on the Web