A two-stage approach for English and Hindi off-line signature verification

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical contribution towards the understanding of multi-script off-line signature identification and verification using a novel method involving off-line Hindi (Devnagari) and English signatures. The main aim of this approach is to demonstrate the significant advantage of the use of signature script identification in a multi-script signature verification environment. In the 1st stage of the proposed signature verification technique a script identification technique is employed to know whether a signature is written in Hindi or English. In the second stage, a verification approach was explored separately for English signatures and Hindi signatures based on the script identification result. Different features like gradient feature, water reservoir feature, loop feature, aspect ratio etc. were employed, and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were considered in our scheme. To get the comparative idea, multi-script signature verification results on the joint Hindi and English dataset without using any script identification technique is also computed. From the experiment results it is noted that we are able to reduce average error rate 4.81% more when script identification method is employed. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.