Offline handwritten signature verification system using a supervised neural network approach

Abstract

Signatures are imperative biometric attributes of humans that have long been used for authorization purposes. Most organizations primarily focus on the visual appearance of the signature for verification purposes. Many documents, such as forms, contracts, bank cheques, and credit card transactions require the signing of a signature. Therefore, it is of upmost importance to be able to recognize signatures accurately, effortlessly, and in a timely manner. In this work, an artificial neural network based on the well-known Back-propagation algorithm is used for recognition and verification. To test the performance of the system, the False Reject Rate, the False Accept Rate, and the Equal Error Rate (EER) are calculated. The system was tested with 400 test signature samples, which include genuine and forged signatures of twenty individuals. The aim of this work is to limit the computer singularity in deciding whether the signature is forged or not, and to allow the signature verification personnel to participate in the deciding process through adding a label which indicates the amount of similarity between the signature which we want to recognize and the original signature. This approach allows judging the signature accuracy, and achieving more effective results.