Writer-independent off-line signature verification using surroundedness feature

The paper presents a novel set of features based on surroundedness property of a signature (image in binary form) for off-line signature verification. The proposed feature set describes the shape of a signature in terms of spatial distribution of black pixels around a candidate pixel (on the signature). It also provides a measure of texture through the correlation among signature pixels in the neighborhood of that candidate pixel. So the proposed feature set is unique in the sense that it contains both shape and texture property unlike most of the earlier proposed features for off-line signature verification. Since the features are proposed based on intuitive idea of the problem, evaluation of features by various feature selection techniques has also been sought to get a compact set of features. To examine the efficacy of the proposed features, two popular classifiers namely, multilayer perceptron and support vector machine are implemented and tested on two publicly available database namely, GPDS300 corpus and CEDAR signature database.

► Off-line signature verification is dealt as a writer independent system.
► A feature set based on surroundedness property of a signature has been proposed.
► An evaluation of six feature selection techniques has been conducted for off-line signature verification.
► Proposed features perform better than the related features like shape context and auto-correlogram.
► Proposed system is tested on GPDS300 and CEDAR signature databases and found superior to the existing systems.