Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Offline handwritten signature verification using local and global features

  • Published:
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to address the problem of offline handwritten signature verification. In contrast to many existing systems, we are interested in making soft decision rather than a purely binary classification for the signatures under verification. To accomplish this goal, we incorporate both types of features: finer intensity-based features and global geometry-based features. Particularly, the finer features are computed for every sample point of a signature using histogram of intensities, and the geometry-based features are extracted using an adaptation of the shape context descriptor. One of the advantages of our approach is that the extracted features are very robust to noise, rotation and scaling change without heavily relying on any complicated pre-processing steps. The extracted features are used to compute the similarity score, followed by a score calibration process to estimate the corresponding confidence score (i.e., using log-likelihood-ratio). To validate our work, we submitted our system to the signature verification competition (SignComp2011) and achieved quite good results.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Belongie, S., Malik, J., Puzicha, J.: Shape matching and object recognition using shape contexts. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24(24), 509–522 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Blumenstein, M., Liu, X.Y., Verma, B.: A modified direction feature for cursive character recognition. In: Proceedings of 2004 IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, vol. 4, pp. 2983–2987 (2004)

  3. Brummer, N., Preez, J.d.: Application-independent evaluation of speaker detection. Computer Speech and Language 20(2), 230–275 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Deng, P.S., Liao, H.-Y.M., Ho, C.W., Tyan, H.-R.: Wavelet-based off-line handwritten signature verification. Comput. Vis. Image Underst. 76(3), 173–190 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. di Baja, G.S.: Well-shaped, stable, and reversible skeletons from the (3,4)-distance transform. J. Visual Comm. and Image Representation 5(1), 107–115 (1994)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. El-Yacoubi, A., El Yacoubi, A., Bortolozzi, F., Sabourin, R.: An off-line signature verification system using hidden markov model and cross-validation. In: Proceedings of the 13th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing, pp. 105–112 (2000)

  7. Fang, B., Leung, C.H., Tang, Y.Y., Kwok, P.C.K., Tse, K.W., Wong, Y.K.: Offline signature verification with generated training samples. IEE Proceedings of Vision, Image and Signal Processing 149(2), 85–90 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Fang, B., Leung, C.H., Tang, Y.Y., Tse, K.W., Kwok, P.C.K., Wong, Y.K.: Offline signature verification by the tracking of featute and stroke positions. Pattern Recog. 36(1), 91–101 (2003)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  9. Fang, B., Wang, Y.Y., Leung, C.H., TSE, K.W., Tang, Y.Y., Kwok, P.C.K., Wong, Y.K.: Offline signature verification by the analysis of cursive strokes. Int. J. Pattern Recognit. Artif. Intell. 15(4), 659–673 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Fischler, M.A., Bolles, R.C.: Random sample consensus: a paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis and automated cartography. Communication ACM 24(6), 381–395 (1981)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  11. Gilperez, A., Alonso-Fernandez, F., Pecharroman, S., Fierrez, J., Ortega-Garcia, J.: Off-line signature verification using contour features. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (2008)

  12. Gonzalez-Rodriguez, J., Fierrez-Aguilar, J., Ramos-Castro, D., Ortega-Garcia, J.: Bayesian analysis of fingerprint, face and signature evidences with automatic biometric systems. Forensic Sci. Int. 155(2), 126–140 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Impedovo, D., Pirlo, G.: Automatic signature verification: The state of the art. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews 38(5), 609–635 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Jena, D., Majhi, B., Panigrahy, S.K., Jena, S.K.: Improved offline signature verification scheme using feature point extraction method. In: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Informatics, pp. 475–480 (2008)

  15. Jonker, R., Volgenant, A.: A shortest augmenting path algorithm for dense and sparse linear assignment problems. Computing 38(4), 325–340 (1987)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. Liwicki, M., Malik, M. I., Elisa van den Heuvel, C., Chen, X., Berger, C., Stoel, R., Blumenstein, M., Found, B.: Signature verification competition for online and offline skilled forgeries (sigcomp2011). In: Proceedings of International Conference of Document Image Analysis, pp. 1480–1485 (2011)

  17. Lowe, D.: Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 60(2), 91–110 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Malik, M.I., Liwicki, M., Dengel, A.: Evaluation of local and global features for offline signature verification. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis, pp. 31–35 (2011)

  19. Malik, M.I., Liwicki, M., Dengel, A.: Evaluation of local and global features for offline signature verification. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis, pp. 31–35 (2011)

  20. Martin, A., Doddington, G., Kamm, T., Ordowski, M., Przybocki, M.: The det curve in assessment of detection task performance. In: Proceedings of Eurospeech’97, pp. 1895–1898 (1997)

  21. Mikolajczyk, K., Schmid, C.: A performance evaluation of local descriptors. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 27(10), 1615–1630 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Otsu, N.: A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 9(1), 62–66 (1979)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  23. Parodi, M., Gomez, J.C.: A circular grid-based feature extraction approach for off-line signature verification. In: Proceedings of the Argentine Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (2010)

  24. Porwal, U., Govindaraju, V.: A co-training based framework for writer identification in offline handwriting. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Automated Forensic Handwriting Analysis, pp. 35–40 (2011)

  25. Ahuja, R.K., Orlin, J.B.: A fast scaling algorithm for minimizing separable convex functions subject to chain constraints. Oper. Res. 49(5), 784–789 (2001)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  26. Piyush Shanker, A., Rajagopalan, A.N.: Off-line signature verification using dtw. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 28(12), 1407–1414 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Zadrozny, B., Elkan, C.: Transforming classifier scores into accurate multiclass probability estimates. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 694–699 (2002)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hong Duc University, Thanh Hoa, Vietnam

    The-Anh Pham & Hong-Ha Le

  2. Institute of Informatics, Vietnamese Academy of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

    Nang-Toan Do

Authors
  1. The-Anh Pham
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hong-Ha Le
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Nang-Toan Do
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to The-Anh Pham.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Pham, TA., Le, HH. & Do, NT. Offline handwritten signature verification using local and global features. Ann Math Artif Intell 75, 231–247 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-014-9427-5

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10472-014-9427-5

Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classifications (2010)

Search

Navigation