Off-line signature identification using background and foreground information

Biometric systems play an important role in the field of information security as they are extremely required for user authentication. Automatic signature recognition and verification is one of the biometric techniques, which is currently receiving renewed interest and is only one of several techniques used to verify the identities of individuals. Signatures provide a secure means for confirmation and authorization in legal documents. So nowadays, signature identification and verification becomes an essential component in automating the rapid processing of documents containing embedded signatures. In this paper, a technique for a bi-script off-line signature identification system is proposed. In the proposed signature identification system, the signatures of English and Bengali (Bangla) are considered for the identification process. Different features such as under sampled bitmaps, modified chain-code direction features and gradient features computed from both background and foreground components are employed for this purpose. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Nearest Neighbour (NN) techniques are considered as classifiers for signature identification in the proposed system. A database of 1554 English signatures and 1092 Bengali signatures are used to generate the experimental results. Various results based on different features are calculated and analysed. The highest accuracies of 99.41%, 98.45% and 97.75% are obtained based on the modified chain-code direction, under-sampled bitmaps and gradient features respectively using 1800 (1100 English+700 Bengali) samples for training and 846 (454 English+392 Bengali) samples for testing.