Signature identification and verification techniques: state-of-the-art work

Signature identification and verification are some of the biometric systems used for personal identification. Signatures can be considered as authentication of an individual by the analysis of handwriting style, subjected to inter-personal and intra-personal variations. This paper presents an extensive systematic overview of online and offline signature identification and verification techniques. In offline signature verification, surveys related to two approaches, namely, writer-dependent, and writer-independent approaches are presented. Moreover, the compiled study of feature extraction and classification techniques used for signature identification and verification process has also been incorporated. Several databases introduced in the literature are considered to evaluate different signature identification and verification techniques and corresponding results are reported in this article. The entire survey is further summarized in the form of a table for comparisons. In order to reveal the superiority of the present survey, the comparison of the present survey with the existing recent survey works has also been presented. Finally, future directions are provided for further research.