Telling Human and Machine Handwriting Apart

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Leiva, Luis A., Diaz, Moises, Attygalle, Nuwan T., Ferrer, Miguel A., Plamondon, Rejean
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Leiva, Luis A.
Diaz, Moises
Attygalle, Nuwan T.
Ferrer, Miguel A.
Plamondon, Rejean
author_facet Leiva, Luis A.
Diaz, Moises
Attygalle, Nuwan T.
Ferrer, Miguel A.
Plamondon, Rejean
contents Handwriting movements can be leveraged as a unique form of behavioral biometrics, to verify whether a real user is operating a device or application. This task can be framed as a reverse Turing test in which a computer has to detect if an input instance has been generated by a human or artificially. To tackle this task, we study ten public datasets of handwritten symbols (isolated characters, digits, gestures, pointing traces, and signatures) that are artificially reproduced using seven different synthesizers, including, among others, the Kinematic Theory (Sigma h model), generative adversarial networks, Transformers, and Diffusion models. We train a shallow recurrent neural network that achieves excellent performance (98.3 percent Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) score and 1.4 percent equal error rate on average across all synthesizers and datasets) using nonfeaturized trajectory data as input. In few-shot settings, we show that our classifier achieves such an excellent performance when trained on just 10 percent of the data, as evaluated on the remaining 90% of the data as a test set. We further challenge our classifier in out-of-domain settings, and observe very competitive results as well. Our work has implications for computerized systems that need to verify human presence, and adds an additional layer of security to keep attackers at bay.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_11700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Telling Human and Machine Handwriting Apart
Leiva, Luis A.
Diaz, Moises
Attygalle, Nuwan T.
Ferrer, Miguel A.
Plamondon, Rejean
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Handwriting movements can be leveraged as a unique form of behavioral biometrics, to verify whether a real user is operating a device or application. This task can be framed as a reverse Turing test in which a computer has to detect if an input instance has been generated by a human or artificially. To tackle this task, we study ten public datasets of handwritten symbols (isolated characters, digits, gestures, pointing traces, and signatures) that are artificially reproduced using seven different synthesizers, including, among others, the Kinematic Theory (Sigma h model), generative adversarial networks, Transformers, and Diffusion models. We train a shallow recurrent neural network that achieves excellent performance (98.3 percent Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) score and 1.4 percent equal error rate on average across all synthesizers and datasets) using nonfeaturized trajectory data as input. In few-shot settings, we show that our classifier achieves such an excellent performance when trained on just 10 percent of the data, as evaluated on the remaining 90% of the data as a test set. We further challenge our classifier in out-of-domain settings, and observe very competitive results as well. Our work has implications for computerized systems that need to verify human presence, and adds an additional layer of security to keep attackers at bay.
title Telling Human and Machine Handwriting Apart
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11700