Deep learning has become a breathtaking technology in the last years, overcoming traditional handcrafted approaches and even humans for many different tasks. However, in some tasks, such as the verification of handwritten signatures, the amount of publicly available data is scarce, what makes difficult to test the real limits of deep learning. In addition to the lack of public data, it is not easy to evaluate the improvements of novel proposed approaches as different databases and experimental protocols are usually considered.
The main contributions of this study are: i) we provide an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art deep learning approaches for on-line signature verification, ii) we present and describe the new DeepSignDB on-line handwritten signature biometric public database, iii) we propose a standard experimental protocol and benchmark to be used for the research community in order to perform a fair comparison of novel approaches with the state of the art, and iv) we adapt and evaluate our recent deep learning approach named Time-Aligned Recurrent Neural Networks (TA-RNNs) for the task of on-line handwritten signature verification. This approach combines the potential of Dynamic Time Warping and Recurrent Neural Networks to train more robust systems against forgeries. Our proposed TA-RNN system outperforms the state of the art, achieving results even below 2.0% EER when considering skilled forgery impostors and just one training signature per user.
University of Fribourg（弗里堡大学）；Smith College（史密斯学院）；University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland（瑞士西北应用科学与艺术大学）；University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland（瑞士西部应用科学与艺术大学）
Graphs provide a powerful representation formalism that offers great promise to benefit tasks like handwritten signature verification. While most state-of-the-art approaches to signature verification rely on fixed-size representations, graphs are flexible in size and allow modeling local features as well as the global structure of the handwriting. In this article, we present two recent graph-based approaches to offline signature verification: keypoint graphs with approximated graph edit distance and inkball models. We provide a comprehensive description of the methods, propose improvements bot…
Jadavpur University（贾达布尔大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）
In this paper, a writer-dependent signature verification method is proposed. Two different types of texture features, namely Wavelet and Local Quantized Patterns (LQP) features, are employed to extract two kinds of transform and statistical based information from signature images. For each writer two separate one-class support vector machines (SVMs) corresponding to each set of LQP and Wavelet features are trained to obtain two different authenticity scores for a given signature. Finally, a score level classifier fusion method is used to integrate the scores obtained from the two one-class SVM…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Although online handwriting verification has made great progress recently, the verification performances are still far behind the real usage owing to the small scale of the datasets as well as the limited biometric mediums. Therefore, this paper proposes a new handwriting verification benchmark dataset named Multimodal Signature and Digit String (MSDS), which consists of two subsets: MSDS-ChS (Chinese Signatures) and MSDS-TDS (Token Digit Strings), contributed by 402 users, with 20 genuine samples and 20 skilled forgeries per user per subset. MSDS-ChS consists of handwritten Chinese signatures…
Multiscale Feature Learning Using Co-Tuplet Loss for Offline Handwritten Signature Verification
Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University（信息管理系，国立台湾大学）；Center for Research in Econometric Theory and Applications, National Taiwan University（计量经济理论与应用研究中心，国立台湾大学）
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
Online signatures are one of the most commonly used biometrics. Several verification systems and public databases were presented in this field. This paper presents a combination of k-nearest neighbor and dynamic time warping algorithms as a verification system using the recently published DeepSignDB database. Our algorithm was applied on both finger and stylus input signatures which represent both office and mobile scenarios. The system was first tested on the development set of the database. It achieved an error rate of 6.04% for the stylus input signatures, 5.20% for the finger input signatu…
IIIT SriCity（斯里城印度信息技术学院）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
The augmented usage of deep learning-based models for various AI related problems are as a result of modern architectures of deeper length and the availability of voluminous interpreted datasets. The models based on these architectures require huge training and storage cost, which makes them inefficient to use in critical applications like online signature verification (OSV) and to deploy in resource constraint devices. As a solution, in this work, our contribution is two-fold. 1) An efficient dimensionality reduction technique, to reduce the number of features to be considered and 2) a state-…
Applications based on biometric authentication have received a lot of interest in the last years due to the breathtaking results obtained using personal traits such as face or fingerprint. However, it is important not to forget that these biometric systems have to withstand different types of possible attacks. This chapter carries out an analysis of different Presentation Attack (PA) scenarios for on-line handwritten signature verification. The main contributions of this chapter are: i) an updated overview of representative methods for Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) in signature biometric…
The use of features extracted using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with a writer-dependent (WD) SVM classifier resulted in significant improvement in performance of handwritten signature verification (HSV) when compared to the previous state-of-the-art methods. In this work it is investigated whether the use of these CNN features provide good results in a writer-independent (WI) HSV context, based on the dichotomy transformation combined with the use of an SVM writer-independent classifier. The experiments performed in the Brazilian and GPDS datasets show that (i) the propo…
This paper describes the experimental framework and results of the ICDAR 2021 Competition on On-Line Signature Verification (SVC 2021). The goal of SVC 2021 is to evaluate the limits of on-line signature verification systems on popular scenarios (office/mobile) and writing inputs (stylus/finger) through large-scale public databases. Three different tasks are considered in the competition, simulating realistic scenarios as both random and skilled forgeries are simultaneously considered on each task. The results obtained in SVC 2021 prove the high potential of deep learning methods. In particula…
Kyushu University（九州大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Signature verification, as a crucial practical documentation analysis task, has been continuously studied by researchers in machine learning and pattern recognition fields. In specific scenarios like confirming financial documents and legal instruments, ensuring the absolute reliability of signatures is of top priority. In this work, we proposed a new method to learn "top-rank pairs" for writer-independent offline signature verification tasks. By this scheme, it is possible to maximize the number of absolutely reliable signatures. More precisely, our method to learn top-rank pairs aims at push…
UAM（马德里自治大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；European Commission - Joint Research Centre（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）；Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria（大加那利岛拉斯帕尔马斯大学）；Hochschule Ansbach（安斯巴赫应用技术大学）；Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics（托木斯克国立控制系统与无线电电子大学）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；FAU（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；Jamia Millia Islamia（贾米亚·米利亚·伊斯兰亚大学）
This article presents SVC-onGoing, an on-going competition for on-line signature verification where researchers can easily benchmark their systems against the state of the art in an open common platform using large-scale public databases, such as DeepSignDB and SVC2021_EvalDB, and standard experimental protocols. SVC-onGoing is based on the ICDAR 2021 Competition on On-Line Signature Verification (SVC 2021), which has been extended to allow participants anytime. The goal of SVC-onGoing is to evaluate the limits of on-line signature verification systems on popular scenarios (office/mobile) and …
University of Tehran（德黑兰大学）；Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所）
The pivotal role of datasets in signature verification systems motivates researchers to collect signature samples. Distinct characteristics of Persian signature demands for richer and culture-dependent offline signature datasets. This paper introduces a new and public Persian offline signature dataset, UTSig, that consists of 8280 images from 115 classes. Each class has 27 genuine signatures, 3 opposite-hand signatures, and 42 skilled forgeries made by 6 forgers. Compared with the other public datasets, UTSig has more samples, more classes, and more forgers. We considered various variables inc…
Online Handwritten Signature Verification Based on Temporal-Spatial Graph Attention Transformer
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室（MAIS）、自动化研究所、中国科学院、北京100190，中国）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China（人工智能学院、中国科学院大学、北京100049，中国）
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Escuela Politecnica Superior（高等理工学院）
On-line signature verification for Tablet PC devices is studied. The on-line signature verification algorithm presented by the authors at the First International Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2004) is adapted to work in Tablet PC environments. An example prototype of securing access and securing document application using this Tablet PC system is also reported. Two different commercial Tablet PCs are evaluated, including information of interest for signature verification systems such as sampling and pressure statistics. Authentication performance experiments are reported considering …
Several works related to information fusion for signature verification have been presented. However, few works have focused on sensor fusion and sensor interoperability. In this paper, these two topics are evaluated for signature verification using two different commercial Tablet PCs. An enrolment strategy using signatures from the two Tablet PCs is also proposed. Authentication performance experiments are reported by using a database with over 3000 signatures.
Inspired by the great success of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in sequential modeling, we introduce a novel RNN system to improve the performance of online signature verification. The training objective is to directly minimize intra-class variations and to push the distances between skilled forgeries and genuine samples above a given threshold. By back-propagating the training signals, our RNN network produced discriminative features with desired metrics. Additionally, we propose a novel descriptor, called the length-normalized path signature (LNPS), and apply it to online signature verific…
Yapı Kredi Technology（Yapı Kredi科技公司）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔理工大学）
Research on offline signature verification has explored a large variety of methods on multiple signature datasets, which are collected under controlled conditions. However, these datasets may not fully reflect the characteristics of the signatures in some practical use cases. Real-world signatures extracted from the formal documents may contain different types of occlusions, for example, stamps, company seals, ruling lines, and signature boxes. Moreover, they may have very high intra-class variations, where even genuine signatures resemble forgeries. In this paper, we address a real-world writ…
Online signature verification is the process of verifying time series signature data which is generally obtained from the tablet-based device. Unlike offline signature images, the online signature image data consists of points that are arranged in a sequence of time. The aim of this research is to develop an improved approach to map the strokes in both test and reference signatures. Current methods make use of the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm and its variant to segment them before comparing each of its data dimension. This paper presents a modified DTW algorithm with the proposed Lost …
In this contribution, a Bayes Ying Yang(BYY) harmony based approach for on-line signature verification is presented. In the proposed method, a simple but effective Gaussian Mixture Models(GMMs) is used to represent for each user's signature model based on the prior information collected. Different from the early works, in this paper, we use the Bayes Ying Yang machine combined with the harmony function to achieve Automatic Model Selection(AMS) during the parameter learning for the GMMs, so that a better approximation of the user model is assured. Experiments on a database from the First Intern…
An open research problem in automatic signature verification is the skilled forgery attacks. However, the skilled forgeries are very difficult to acquire for representation learning. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes to learn dynamic signature representations through ranking synthesized signatures. First, a neuromotor inspired signature synthesis method is proposed to synthesize signatures with different distortion levels for any template signature. Then, given the templates, we construct a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional network to learn to rank the synthesized samples, and …
Identity verification based on authenticity assessment of a handwritten signature is an important issue in biometrics. There are many effective methods for signature verification taking into account dynamics of a signing process. Methods based on partitioning take a very important place among them. In this paper we propose a new approach to signature partitioning. Its most important feature is the possibility of selecting and processing of hybrid partitions in order to increase a precision of the test signature analysis. Partitions are formed by a combination of vertical and horizontal section…
Offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in biometrics and document forensics. Unlike other verification problems, it needs to model minute but critical details between genuine and forged signatures, because a skilled falsification might often resembles the real signature with small deformation. This verification task is even harder in writer independent scenarios which is undeniably fiscal for realistic cases. In this paper, we model an offline writer independent signature verification task with a convolutional Siamese network. Siamese networks are twin networks wit…
A method for offline signature verification is presented in this paper. It is based on the segmentation of the signature skeleton (through standard image skeletonization) into unambiguous sequences of points, or unambiguously connected skeleton segments corresponding to vectorial representations of signature portions. These segments are assumed to be the fundamental carriers of useful information for authenticity verification, and are compactly encoded as sets of 9 scalars (4 sampled coordinates and 1 length measure). Thus signature authenticity is inferred through Euclidean distance based com…
Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Signature is widely used in human daily lives, and serves as a supplementary characteristic for verifying human identity. However, there is rare work of verifying signature. In this paper, we propose a few deep learning architectures to tackle this task, ranging from CNN, RNN to CNN-RNN compact model. We also improve Path Signature Features by encoding temporal information in order to enlarge the discrepancy between genuine and forgery signatures. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our constructed models and features representations.
Postgraduate Department of Studies in Computer Science, JSS College of Arts, Commerce and Science（JSS艺术、商业与科学学院计算机科学研究生系）
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for verification of on-line signatures based on user dependent feature selection and symbolic representation. Unlike other signature verification methods, which work with same features for all users, the proposed approach introduces the concept of user dependent features. It exploits the typicality of each and every user to select different features for different users. Initially all possible features are extracted for all users and a method of feature selection is employed for selecting user dependent features. The selected features are clustered usi…
K.N.Toosi University of Technology（科霍达德·纳赛尔·图西理工大学）；Islamic Azad University（伊斯兰阿扎德大学）
Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been recently used for feature extraction and classification in image and speech recognition, where their inputs have been raw signal or other complicated features. Persian signature verification is done using conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose to use FCN for learning a robust feature extraction from the raw signature images. FCN can be considered as a variant of CNN where its fully connected layers are replaced with a global pooling layer. In the proposed manner, FCN inputs are raw signature images and convolut…
University of Fribourg（弗里堡大学）；University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland（瑞士西北应用科学与艺术大学）；University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland（瑞士西部应用科学与艺术大学）
Biometric authentication by means of handwritten signatures is a challenging pattern recognition task, which aims to infer a writer model from only a handful of genuine signatures. In order to make it more difficult for a forger to attack the verification system, a promising strategy is to combine different writer models. In this work, we propose to complement a recent structural approach to offline signature verification based on graph edit distance with a statistical approach based on metric learning with deep neural networks. On the MCYT and GPDS benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that comb…
Iran University of Science & Technology（伊朗科技大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
This paper presents an accurate method for verifying online signatures. The main difficulty of signature verification come from: (1) Lacking enough training samples (2) The methods must be spatial change invariant. To deal with these difficulties and modeling the signatures efficiently, we propose a method that a one-class classifier per each user is built on discriminative features. First, we pre-train a sparse auto-encoder using a large number of unlabeled signatures, then we applied the discriminative features, which are learned by auto-encoder to represent the training and testing signatur…
Low-cost portable devices capable of capturing signature signals are being increasingly used. Additionally, the social and legal acceptance of the written signature for authentication purposes is opening a range of new applications. We describe a highly versatile and scalable prototype for Web-based secure access using signature verification. The proposed architecture can be easily extended to work with different kinds of sensors and large-scale databases. Several remarks are also given on security and privacy of network-based signature verification.
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Escuela Politecnica Superior（高等理工学院）
Architectures based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully applied to many different tasks such as speech or handwriting recognition with state-of-the-art results. The main contribution of this work is to analyse the feasibility of RNNs for on-line signature verification in real practical scenarios. We have considered a system based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with a Siamese architecture whose goal is to learn a similarity metric from pairs of signatures. For the experimental work, the BiosecurID database comprised of 400 users and 4 separated acquisition sessions are …
Malek-Ashtar University of Technology（马利克-阿什塔尔技术大学）
Biometrics systems have been used in a wide range of applications and have improved people authentication. Signature verification is one of the most common biometric methods with techniques that employ various specifications of a signature. Recently, deep learning has achieved great success in many fields, such as image, sounds and text processing. In this paper, deep learning method has been used for feature extraction and feature selection.
Indian Institute of Information Technology Allahabad（印度阿拉哈巴德信息技术学院）
Signature verification has been one of the major researched areas in the field of computer vision. Many financial and legal organizations use signature verification as access control and authentication. Signature images are not rich in texture; however, they have much vital geometrical information. Through this work, we have proposed a signature verification methodology that is simple yet effective. The technique presented in this paper harnesses the geometrical features of a signature image like center, isolated points, connected components, etc., and with the power of Artificial Neural Netwo…
In this work, a feature extraction method for offline signature verification is presented that harnesses the power of sparse representation in order to deliver state-of-the-art verification performance in several signature datasets like CEDAR, MCYT-75, GPDS and UTSIG. Beyond the accuracy improvements, several major parameters associated with sparse representation; such as selected configuration, dictionary size, sparsity level and positivity priors are investigated. Besides, it is evinced that 2nd order statistics of the sparse codes is a powerful pooling function for the formation of the glob…
École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）；Federal University of Paraná（巴拉那联邦大学）
The area of Handwritten Signature Verification has been broadly researched in the last decades, but remains an open research problem. The objective of signature verification systems is to discriminate if a given signature is genuine (produced by the claimed individual), or a forgery (produced by an impostor). This has demonstrated to be a challenging task, in particular in the offline (static) scenario, that uses images of scanned signatures, where the dynamic information about the signing process is not available. Many advancements have been proposed in the literature in the last 5-10 years, …
École de Technologie Supérieure, University of Quebec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）；Federal University of Parana (UFPR)（巴拉那联邦大学）
Verifying the identity of a person using handwritten signatures is challenging in the presence of skilled forgeries, where a forger has access to a person's signature and deliberately attempt to imitate it. In offline (static) signature verification, the dynamic information of the signature writing process is lost, and it is difficult to design good feature extractors that can distinguish genuine signatures and skilled forgeries. This reflects in a relatively poor performance, with verification errors around 7% in the best systems in the literature. To address both the difficulty of obtaining …
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院哈拉格布尔分校）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
Writer independent offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in pattern recognition as there is often a scarcity of training data. To handle such data scarcity problem, in this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for writer independent offline signature verification. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize self-supervised setting for the signature verification task. The objective of self-supervised representation learning from the signature images is achieved by minimizing the cross-covariance between two random variables …
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Tel-Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）
Online signature verification technologies, such as those available in banks and post offices, rely on dedicated digital devices such as tablets or smart pens to capture, analyze and verify signatures. In this paper, we suggest a novel method for online signature verification that relies on the increasingly available hand-worn devices, such as smartwatches or fitness trackers, instead of dedicated ad-hoc devices. Our method uses a set of known genuine and forged signatures, recorded using the motion sensors of a hand-worn device, to train a machine learning classifier. Then, given the recordin…
Online Signature Verification (OSV) is a widely used biometric attribute for user behavioral characteristic verification in digital forensics. In this manuscript, owing to large intra-individual variability, a novel method for OSV based on an interval symbolic representation and a fuzzy similarity measure grounded on writer specific parameter selection is proposed. The two parameters, namely, writer specific acceptance threshold and optimal feature set to be used for authenticating the writer are selected based on minimum equal error rate (EER) attained during parameter fixation phase using th…
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco（伯南布哥联邦大学）；École de Technologie Supérieure - Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）
High number of writers, small number of training samples per writer with high intra-class variability and heavily imbalanced class distributions are among the challenges and difficulties of the offline Handwritten Signature Verification (HSV) problem. A good alternative to tackle these issues is to use a writer-independent (WI) framework. In WI systems, a single model is trained to perform signature verification for all writers from a dissimilarity space generated by the dichotomy transformation. Among the advantages of this framework is its scalability to deal with some of these challenges an…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City（斯里城印度信息技术学院）；University of Mysore（迈索尔大学）
Online signature verification (OSV) is one of the most challenging tasks in writer identification and digital forensics. Owing to the large intra-individual variability, there is a critical requirement to accurately learn the intra-personal variations of the signature to achieve higher classification accuracy. To achieve this, in this paper, we propose an OSV framework based on deep convolutional Siamese network (DCSN). DCSN automatically extracts robust feature descriptions based on metric-based loss function which decreases intra-writer variability (Genuine-Genuine) and increases inter-indiv…
This study explores how robots and generative approaches can be used to mount successful false-acceptance adversarial attacks on signature verification systems. Initially, a convolutional neural network topology and data augmentation strategy are explored and tuned, producing an 87.12% accurate model for the verification of 2,640 human signatures. Two robots are then tasked with forging 50 signatures, where 25 are used for the verification attack, and the remaining 25 are used for tuning of the model to defend against them. Adversarial attacks on the system show that there exists an informatio…
Centro de Informática, UFPE（伯南布哥联邦大学信息中心）；École de Technologie Supérieure - Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）
This paper investigates the presence of overfitting when using Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) to perform the feature selection in a context of Handwritten Signature Verification (HSV). SigNet is a state of the art Deep CNN model for feature representation in the HSV context and contains 2048 dimensions. Some of these dimensions may include redundant information in the dissimilarity representation space generated by the dichotomy transformation (DT) used by the writer-independent (WI) approach. The analysis is carried out on the GPDS-960 dataset. Experiments demonstrate that the prop…
École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec（魁北克大学高等技术学院）；Federal University of Parana（巴拉那联邦大学）
Offline Handwritten Signature verification presents a challenging Pattern Recognition problem, where only knowledge of the positive class is available for training. While classifiers have access to a few genuine signatures for training, during generalization they also need to discriminate forgeries. This is particularly challenging for skilled forgeries, where a forger practices imitating the user's signature, and often is able to create forgeries visually close to the original signatures. Most work in the literature address this issue by training for a surrogate objective: discriminating genu…
Jadavpur University（贾达布尔大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
Offline Signature Verification (OSV) is a fundamental biometric task across various forensic, commercial and legal applications. The underlying task at hand is to carefully model fine-grained features of the signatures to distinguish between genuine and forged ones, which differ only in minute deformities. This makes OSV more challenging compared to other verification problems. In this work, we propose a two-stage deep learning framework that leverages self-supervised representation learning as well as metric learning for writer-independent OSV. First, we train an image reconstruction network …
Universidade Federal de Alagoas（阿拉戈斯联邦大学）；Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires（布宜诺斯艾利斯理工学院）；Universidad de los Andes（安第斯大学）；Universidade Federal de Pernambuco（伯南布哥联邦大学）
We present a new approach for online handwritten signature classification and verification based on descriptors stemming from Information Theory. The proposal uses the Shannon Entropy, the Statistical Complexity, and the Fisher Information evaluated over the Bandt and Pompe symbolization of the horizontal and vertical coordinates of signatures. These six features are easy and fast to compute, and they are the input to an One-Class Support Vector Machine classifier. The results produced surpass state-of-the-art techniques that employ higher-dimensional feature spaces which often require special…
