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Innovation & Technology Request

Software to analyse handwritten text

Country of Origin: United Kingdom
Reference Number: TRUK20190801001
Publication Date: 1 August 2019

Summary

A school of graphology needs to analyse handwritten text not from a forensic perspective but following its own rules for measuring various features in the characters, lines and spacings. A description of requirements is attached to this profile. Academic or industry software developers are sought who are capable of building on existing tools for text analysis, based on these requirements. Type of co-operation may include technical, licensing, services agreements.

Description

A school of graphology in the East of England is looking for developers to collaborate on the analysis of handwritten text.

There are several software packages commercially available that analyse handwriting. Most of them are destined for forensic analysis, i.e. identifying the authorship of a text.

Then there are solutions for OCR (optical character recognition) and HTR (handwritten text recognition) that are good for digitising archives, searching through these etc. They do look at some features that graphologists are interested in but not nearly enough.

There is an attachment to this profile that gives sufficient detail to understand the problem. A graphologists needs to painstakingly measure the features of characters, words, lines and spacings, and export statistically solid measurements. These can then be correlated to personal traits. All the loops, crosses, downstrokes etc give very interesting observations about the author, but its analysis is not just art, it needs to be thorough and scientific.

It is quite possible there is freeware out there that will do parts of the job. There is a plugin called GraphJ that promises to do a lot but it is not publicly available just yet. Either way, the school of graphology needs to team up with some software developer(s) who can exploit the pre-existing code and add bespoke features.

The planned tool should be of great interest to the whole community in this niche market so it can be commercialised.

The type of co-operation may include technical co-operation, a services agreement and licensing. The project may be straightforward so that the partner quickly comes up with a detailed plan and offers the work as service. It can also be more complex than currently believed, so that the UK organisation and the partner need to agree on subtasks and milestones, and where significant further input is needed from the UK end. Presumbably, in either case the UK organisation wishes to keep the rights to the tool under a software license agreement.

If the partner is already active in an adjacent field, shared ownership of the new tool will be considered.

Expertise sought

The requirements have been illustrated in the attachment.

Requested partner

Type of partner sought: industry or academia;

Specific area of activity: experience with analysing handwritten text;

Role of partner sought: to build on freely available tools and build a bespoke tool. The project may be straightforward so that the partner quickly comes up with a detailed plan and offers the work as a service. It can also be more complex than currently believed, so that the UK organisation and the partner need to agree on subtasks and milestones, and where significant further input is needed from the UK end. Presumbably, in either case the UK organisation wishes to keep the rights to the tool under a software license agreement.

If the partner is already active in an adjacent field, shared ownership of the new tool will be considered.