Dissimilarity representation for handwritten signature verification

Dissimilarity representation for handwritten signature verification

Eskander, George S. and Sabourin, Robert and Granger, Eric

CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2013

Abstract : Signature verification (SV) systems authenticate individuals, based on their handwritten signatures. The standard approach for such systems employ feature representations (FR), where features are extracted from the signature signals and classifiers are designed in the feature space. Performance of FR-based systems is limited by the quality of employed feature representations and the quantity of training data. The dissimilarity representation (DR) approach is recently introduced to pattern recognition community, where proximity among patterns constitute the classification space. Similar concept has been applied by forensic Questioned Document Examination (QDE) experts, where proximity between questioned signatures and a set of templates lead to the authentication decision. Recently, few automatic SV systems are proposed to simulate the QDE approach, by employing DR-based pattern recognition methods. In this paper, we explore different scenarios for employing the DR approach for replacing and/or enhancing the standard SV systems. A general framework for designing FR/DR based systems is proposed, that might guide the signature processing research direction to new areas.