Multi-script Off-line Signature Verification: A Two Stage Approach

Signature identification and verification are of great importance in authentication systems. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an experimental contribution in the direction of multi-script off-line signature identification and verification using a novel technique involving off-line English, Hindi (Devnagari) and Bangla (Bengali) signatures. In the first evaluation stage of the proposed signature verification technique, the performance of a multi-script off-line signature verification system, considering a joint dataset of English, Hindi and Bangla signatures, was investigated. In the second stage of experimentation, multi-script signatures were identified based on the script type, and subsequently the verification task was explored separately for English, Hindi and Bangla signatures based on the identified script result. The gradient and chain code features were employed, and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) along with the Modified Quadratic Discriminate Function (MQDF) were considered in this scheme. From the experimental results achieved, it is noted that the verification accuracy obtained in the second stage of experiments (where a signature script identification method was introduced) is better than the verification accuracy produced following the first stage of experiments. Experimental results indicated that an average error rate of 20.80% and 16.40% were obtained for two different types of verification experiments. Keywords—Biometrics; off-line signature verification; multiscript signature identification.