Find and remove handwritten signatures in printed documents

[Mats Bovin]

Hi!

I have the following problem. We have lots of scanned documents in tiff-format containing printed text. The documents also contain handwritten signatures. We want to remove or blur out the handwritten signatures so they can't be copied. I guess the approach would be to identify areas in the image containing handwritten text (or at least non-printed text) and get the image coordinates for those areas to be able to blur them out. 

I am completely new to the area of OCR and image recognition so I would appreciate any advice at all to get started. Is this at all possible? Is tesseract a good tool for the job or are there other alternatives? Or should I use some completely different approach?

Cheers,

/Mats