SVM and NN based offline signature verification

Among all of the biometric authentication systems, handwritten signatures are considered as the most legally and socially accepted attributes for personal verification. The objective of this paper is to present an empirical contribution toward the understanding of a threshold-based signature verification technique involving off-line Bangla (Bengali) signatures. Experiments on signature verification concerning non-English signatures are an important consideration in the signature verification area. Only very few research works employing signatures of Indian script have been considered in the field of non-English based signature verification. To fill this gap, a threshold-based scheme for the verification of off-line Bangla signatures is proposed. Some techniques such as under-sampled bitmap, intersection/end point and directional chain code are employed for feature extraction. The thresholds are computed based on the similarity measures obtained employing the nearest neighbor classifier. The SVM classifier has also been considered for mainly comparative experimental result generation. Furthermore, a Bangla signature database, which consists of 2400 (100 × 24) genuine signatures and 3000 (100 × 30) forgeries, has been created and is employed for experimentation. An average error rate (AER) of 12.33% was obtained as the best verification result using directional chain code features in this research work. As a comparative study, a different dataset (GPDS-160) has also been considered.