Using Landmarks to Establish a Point-to-Point Correspondence between Signatures

This paper introduces a new approach for point-to-point correspondence finding, which can be used as pre-processing stage of a handwritten signature verification procedure. This approach provides a solid basis for comparing function features of two handwritten signatures. Corner points of the signatures are first extracted based on velocity information. The characteristics of curvilinear velocity and angular velocity are combined successfully by functions based on membership criteria. The signatures to be compared are then segmented at landmarks obtained by corner matching based on similarity measures. In the last step, the corresponding pairs of segments are mapped by a point-to-point matching algorithm, minimising a curve deformation energy. The techniques described were applied to a set of 188 signatures from 19 volunteers. The resulting point-to-point matching of signature pairs was satisfactory in all cases where there was a visual agreement between the signatures.