Graphology / Handwriting Analysis

1. Graphology / Handwriting Analysis

2. Handwriting analyzing can tell a lot about personality • Large companies use graphology (handwriting analyzing) to check job applications, • The police still use handwriting experts to determine who wrote what

3. Graphology or Handwriting Analysis is a science of interpreting a person's character from his/her personal handwriting. • Coupled with psychology and knowledge of human behavior, it can be used for many varied purposes. For example, Recruitment, Marriage compatibility, Career Guidance, Motivate workers, Child development.. etc. • Signature is not the best way to analyze character from handwriting , for several reasons. • Firstly, the Signature is sometimes illegible and different from the normal handwriting. • Secondly, the lone signature does not give enough words and letters to help the graphologist in his/her judgment. • But signature samples do have certain advantage. Firstly they are easy to collect; even over long periods of time.

4. Graphology can analyze a person's personality without the person’s knowledge that he/she is being analyzed. Thus reducing the possibility of inaccuracies due to conscious or unconscious effort by the subject to affect the result. • Distortion of the result due to the subject's knowledge that he/she is being analyzed is common in most Question-&-Answer type of personality analysis tools. • It's better to use graphology to analyze the handwriting of a pure untainted subject , rather than to put the subject under unnatural stress of a long questionnaire. • Also, a single personality questionnaire may reveal a single dimension of personality. But two handwriting samples of the same person at different occasion may reveals different behaviour characteristics

5. What is Graphoanalysis? • Graphoanalysis is a scientific system of identifying and assessing the character and personality of an individual through a study of handwriting. The techniques used are based on a well-defined, standardized method of: • identifying strokes, • relating these strokes to specific personality traits, and • evaluating the relative strength of the interrelated traits.

6. THE HIDDEN MEANING OF HANDWRITING • Handwriting gives us access to inside secrets about the hidden meaning of handwriting • If you received a note like the one below • What would you be able to tell about the writer? The words are friendly enough! • If you look a little closer you will see that there are a number of conflicting signs.  • Can you see the danger signals?  There are red flags popping up all over the place

8. An understanding of handwriting analysis will quickly show you that this writer is dogmatic and dictatorial, emotionally unstable, bad tempered and possibly even violent! • It's even possible to find the underlying reasons for the danger signals and to understand why the writer has so much personal conflict in his life. • You'll be surprised to discover how much detail can be extracted from just a single page of handwriting.  • Of course, to be able to read these signs yourself, you will need to have some understanding of handwriting analysis first.

9. Handwriting Guidelines • Get a sheet of paper, sign your name, and start to analyze with these guidelines: • Writing that leans to the right shows good communication skills. • Straight, vertical writing shows independence and stability. • Writing that leans to the left may mean you find it difficult to communicate. • Small writing can be a sign of modesty. • Large writing indicates enthusiasm and generosity.

11. Exercise ( 15 minutes) • Get a paper and write the following sentences: • Go west young man and grow up with the country • It is Valentino’s day today, so I will give her … • Give it to your group member to analyze it – based on the guidelines.

12. OCR: Handwriting

13. OCR: Handwriting • For more than thirty years, researchers have been working on handwriting recognition. • As in the case of speech processing, they aimed at designing systems able to understand personal encoding of natural language • Methods and recognition rates depend on the level of constraints on handwriting. • The constraints are mainly characterized by the: • types of handwriting, • number of scriptors, • size of the vocabulary • spatial layout.

14. Methods and Strategies • Recognition strategies heavily depends on the nature of the data to be recognized. • In the cursive case, the problem is made complex by the fact that the writing is fundamentally ambiguous as the letters in the word are generally linked together, poorly written and may even be missing. • On the contrary, hand printed word recognition is more related to printed word recognition, the individual letters composing the word being usually much easier to isolate and to identify.

15. Character Recognition • Character Recognition techniques can be classified according to two criteria: • the way preprocessing is performed on the data • the type of the decision algorithm. • Preprocessing techniques include three main categories: • the use of global transforms (correlation, Fourier descriptors, etc.), • local comparison (local densities, intersections with straight lines, variable masks, characteristic loci, etc.) • geometrical or topological characteristics (strokes, loops, openings, diacritical marks, skeleton, etc.). • Depending on the type of preprocessing stage, various kinds of decision methods have been used such as: • various statistical methods, • neural networks, structural matchings (on trees, chains, etc.) • stochastic processing (Markov chains, etc.).

16. Handwritten Word Recognition • Two main types of strategies have been applied to this problem since the beginning of research in this field: • the holistic approach - recognition is globally performed on the whole representation of words and there is no attempt to identify characters individually. • The main advantage of holistic methods is that they avoid word segmentation • the analytical approach In the first case - deal with several levels of representation corresponding to increasing levels of abstraction (usually the feature level, the grapheme or pseudo-letter level and the word level). Words are not considered as a whole, but as sequences of smaller size units which must be easily related to characters in order to make recognition independent from a specific vocabulary

17. Lab Exercise • Go to the following site and do an online handwriting analysis. • http://www.myhandwriting.com/index.html • http://www.compatamate.com/HandwritingAnalysis.html