Pen Ink Analysis in Handwritten Document Forensics
Rojalin Dash, Prabhat Dansena, Prasun Chandra Tripathi, Ashish Ranjan · 2025
Document forensics, or questioned document examination, is a branch of forensic science that involves analysing documents to establish their authenticity, origin, or characteristics. This field covers handwriting analysis, signature verification, ink and paper analysis, examination of printing processes, detection of alterations, and analysis of typewritten documents. Document forensics is commonly used in legal cases and fraud investigations to determine the legitimacy of documents. Qualified document examiners employ scientific methods to provide expert opinions on various aspects of document authenticity. Among different methods, pen ink analysis is a useful way to conduct hand-written document analysis. In this chapter, we study various methods of pen ink analysis for handwritten documents. We explain chromatography, spectroscopy, and image processing-based methods. We also investigate recent machine learning (ML)-based methods.