We are pleased to announce the 2nd International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis to be held as a satellite workshop of the ICDAR 2013 in Washington DC, USA during August 22-23, 2013. The AFHA 2013 will continue the approach of bringing together researchers in the field of automated handwriting analysis and signature verification and experts from the forensic handwriting examination community. It will be organized as a two-day combined workshop and tutorial similar to the AFHA 2011 which attracted more than 30 participants.

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. In this tutorial we will give insights into the daily work to be performed by professional FHEs and give examples for their case-work. Furthermore, we will give an overview on the work done in the pattern recognition area and a comparison of state-of-the-art automatic verification systems. In the second half we will introduce two automatic approaches for off-line and on-line signature verification with more detail and explain all the processing steps. Additionally, we will provide parts of these systems as a starting point for the development of identification systems for the participants. Note that there have been tutorials in 2011 and 2012, but every time, we cover new aspects and due to the discussions the tutorials have been interesting to regular attendees as well.

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 this 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:

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

The proceedings will be made available electronically as Open Access on the web before the workshop starts, similar to the AFHA 2011 proceedings, i.e., http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-768/