An Efficient Signature Verification Method based on an Interval Symbolic Representation and a Fuzzy Similarity Measure

Abstract

In this paper an efficient off-line signature verification method based on an interval symbolic representation and a fuzzy similarity measure is proposed. In the feature extraction step, a set of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) based features is computed from both the signature image and its under-sampled bitmap. Interval-valued symbolic data is then created for each feature in every signature class. As a result, a signature model composed of a set of interval values (corresponding to the number of features) is obtained for each individual’s handwritten signature class. A novel fuzzy similarity measure is further proposed to compute the similarity between a test sample signature and the corresponding interval-valued symbolic model for the verification of the test sample. To evaluate the proposed verification approach, a benchmark off-line English signature dataset (GPDS-300) and a large dataset (BHSig260) composed of Bangla and Hindi off-line signatures were used. A comparison of our results with some recent signature verification methods available in the literature was provided in terms of average error rate and we noted that the proposed method always outperforms when the number of training samples is eight or more.