An Ensemble Based Offline Handwritten Signature Verification System

Abstract

In the field of security and forgery prevention, handwritten signatures are the most widely recognized biometric since long and also most practical. Although handwritten signature verification systems are studied using both On-line and Off–line approaches, Off-line signature verification systems are more difficult to compare to On-line verification systems. This is due to the lack of dynamic information, viz. a database which constantly stores the latest signature of the person. In the paper, an approach using ensemble methods are adopted to classify a signature as forgery or not. In the proposed system, three classifiers, viz, one unsupervised, viz. Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and two supervised classifiers, viz. Naive Bayes (NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are used as base classifiers. An attempt is made to compare the different approaches. We attempt both the categories of classification not only because both of them are applicable in this particular case but also intending to find out which performs better. In most cases, it is observed that Naive Bayes and Ensemble are comparable as they exhibit better performance than the other two. But among them, in most of the cases Ensemble classifier performs better than the Naive Bayes and consequently, we have taken the Ensemble as a final classifier.