Signature verification based on inter-stroke and intra-stroke information

Signature verification is one of the most popular subjects in pattern recognition. Many kinds of verification methods for online handwritten signatures have basically used the individual features of signatures. However, how to reflect inter-stroke information extracted from handwritten multi-stroke signatures in the verification has not been well considered. This paper suggests a new verification method that uses inter-stroke information based on shape contexts. The shape context describes how points are distributed around a given point on the shape. We compare our Shape Context method with a basic method. The basic method performs signature verification using intra-stroke information such as pen position, pen pressure, pen inclination, pen altitude and elapsed time by DP matching. The Shape Context method treats inter-stroke information such as point distribution. In addition, we try to improve the accuracy of the method by incorporating a weighted evaluation of the average pressure value of each stroke. Comparing with the basic method, the Shape Context method reduces false rejection rate from 4.14% to 1.54%, and false acceptance rate from 4.06% to 2.01%. The experimental results show the effectiveness of inter-stroke information on signature verification.