Slant of signature and handwriting The slant of the handwriting and the signature of a person represents the level

of emotional investment of the author. The slant of the writing can tell the examiner about personality traits such as communication skills and whether the person is warm and loving or tries to remain aloof. To measure the slope of both the writing and the signature we calculate the slope of the writing sample along the horizontal and vertical directions respectively. To calculate the slope we used the following equation

Figure-2 Lines detected by standard hough transform on the image. The hough function implements the Standard Hough Transform (SHT). The SHT uses the parametric representation of a line: rho = x*cos(theta) + y*sin(theta) The variable rho is the distance from the origin to the line along a vector perpendicular to the line. theta is the angle of the perpendicular projection from the origin to the line measured in degrees clockwise from the positive x-axis. The range of theta is . The angle of the line itself is , also measured clockwise with respect to the positive xaxis. The SHT is a parameter space matrix whose rows and columns correspond to rho and theta values respectively. The elements in the SHT represent accumulator cells. Initially, each cell is set to zero. Then, for every non-background point in the image, rho is calculated for every theta. Rho is rounded off to the nearest allowed row in SHT. That accumulator cell is incremented. At the end of this procedure, a value of Q in SHT(r,c) means that Q points in the XY plane lie on the line specified by the theta(c) and rho(r). Peak values in the SHT represent potential lines in the input image.

(1) To find out the horizontal slope of the handwriting as well as the signature we first applied a horizontal sobel edge detector on the sample image to detect the horizontal lines in the image. The sobel edge operator calculates the gradient of the image intensity at each point, giving the direction of the largest possible increase from light to dark and the rate of change in that direction. The result therefore shows how "abruptly" or "smoothly" the image changes at that point, and therefore how likely it is that that part of the image represents an edge, as well as how that edge is likely to be oriented. The edge operator gives the output as shown in the following figure.

Figure-1 Edges detected by vertical sobel edge detector After detecting the edges in both the horizontal and vertical direction, we applied the standard hough transform on the image to find out the lines in both the horizontal and vertical directions as shown in the following figure

The slopes of the sets of the lines in both the horizontal and vertical directions was calculated and the most frequently occurring value of the slope was taken as the slope of the signature sample in the horizontal and vertical directions respectively.

The slopes were then analysed to give the characteristic traits of the person according to the following observations of graphology: Slant of writing Signature is right sloping Signature is left sloping Right slanting handwriting with vertical signature Vertical handwriting with right sloping signature Personality Communicative, elated, optimistic, friendly Pessimistic, negative, depressed In public person is difficult to know but in private is warm and friendly In public person is expressive and jovial but in private is more reserved