The use of biometric technologies for human identity verification is growing rapidly in civilized society and showing its advancement towards the usability of biometrics for security. Off-line signature verification is considered as a behavioral characteristic based biometric trait in the field of security and the prevention of fraud. So, offline signatures are extensively used as a means of personal verification and identification. Manual signature-based authentication of a large number of documents is a very difficult and time consuming task. Consequently for many years, in the field of protected communication and financial applications, we have observed an explosive growth in biometric personal authentication systems that are closely connected with measurable physical unique characteristics (hand geometry, iris scan, finger prints or DNA).. Human signatures also provide secure means for confirmation and authorization in legal documents. So nowadays, automatic signature verification becomes an essential component. In order to convey the state-of-the-art in the field to researchers, in this paper we present a survey of off-line signature verification systems.