Hindi Off-line Signature Verification

Handwritten Signatures are one of the widely used biometrics for document authentication as well as human authorization. The purpose of this paper is to present an off-line signature verification system involving Hindi signatures. Signature verification is a process by which the questioned signature is examined in detail in order to determine whether it belongs to the claimed person or not. Despite of substantial research in the field of signature verification involving Western signatures, very little attention has been dedicated to non-Western signatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian etc. In this paper, the performance of an off-line signature verification system involving Hindi signatures, whose style is distinct from Western scripts, has been investigated. The gradient and Zernike moment features were employed and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were considered for verification. To the best of the authors' knowledge, Hindi signatures have never been used for the task of signature verification and this is the first report of using Hindi signatures in this area. The Hindi signature database employed for experimentation consisted of 840 (35x24) genuine signatures and 1050 (35x30) forgeries. An encouraging accuracy of 7.42% FRR and 4.28% FAR were obtained following experimentation when the gradient features were employed.