A Comparative Study of In-Air Trajectories at Short and Long Distances in Online Handwriting

Existing literature about online handwriting analysis to support pathology diagnosis has taken advantage of in-air trajectories. A similar situation occurred in biometric security applications where the goal is to identify or verify an individual using his signature or handwriting. These studies do not consider the distance of the pen tip to the writing surface. This is due to the fact that current acquisition devices do not provide height formation. However, it is quite straightforward to differentiate movements at two different heights (a) short distance: height lower or equal to 1 cm above a surface of digitizer, the digitizer provides x and y coordinates; (b) long distance: height exceeding 1 cm, the only information available is a time stamp that indicates the time that a specific stroke has spent at long distance. Although short distance has been used in several papers, long distances have been ignored and will be investigated in this paper. In this paper, we will analyze a large set of databases (BIOSECUR-ID, EMOTHAW, PaHaW, OXYGEN-THERAPY, and SALT), which contain a total amount of 663 users and 17,951 files. We have specifically studied (a) the percentage of time spent on-surface, in-air at short distance, and in-air at long distance for different user profiles (pathological and healthy users) and different tasks; (b) the potential use of these signals to improve classification rates. Our experimental results reveal that long distance movements represent a very small portion of the total execution time (0.5% in the case of signatures and 10.4% for uppercase words of BIOSECUR-ID, which is the largest database). In addition, significant differences have been found in the comparison of pathological versus control group for letter “l” in PaHaW database (p = 0.0157) and crossed pentagons in SALT database (p = 0.0122).