Online signature verification based on a single template via elastic curve matching

Abstract

Person verification using online handwritten signatures is one of the most widely researched behavior‐biometrics. Many signature verification systems typically require five, ten, or even more signatures for an enrolled user to provide an accurate verification of the claimed identity. To mitigate this drawback, this paper proposes a new elastic curve matching using only one reference signature, which we have named the curve similarity model (CSM). In the CSM, we give a new definition of curve similarity and its calculation method. We use evolutionary computation (EC) to search for the optimal matching between two curves under different similarity transformations, so as to obtain the similarity distance between two curves. Referring to the geometric similarity property, curve similarity can realize translation, stretching and rotation transformation between curves, thus adapting to the inconsistency of signature size, position and rotation angle in signature curves. In the matching process of signature curves, we design a sectional optimal matching algorithm. On this basis, for each section, we develop a new consistent and discriminative fusion feature extraction for identifying the similarity of signature curves. The experimental results show that our system achieves the same performance with five samples assessed with multiple state‐of‐the‐art automatic signature verifiers and multiple datasets. Furthermore, it suggests that our system, with a single reference signature, is capable of achieving a similar performance to other systems with up to five signatures trained.