In the field of information security, the usage of biometrics is growing for user authentication. Automatic signature recognition and verification is one of the biometric techniques, which is only one of several used to verify the identity of individuals. In this paper, a foreground and background based technique is proposed for identification of scripts from bi-lingual (English/Roman and Chinese) off-line signatures. This system will identify whether a claimed signature belongs to the group of English signatures or Chinese signatures. The identification of signatures based on its script is a major contribution for multi-script signature verification. Two background information extraction techniques are used to produce the background components of the signature images. Gradient-based method was used to extract the features of the foreground as well as background components. Zernike Moment feature was also employed on signature samples. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the classifier for signature identification in the proposed system. A database of 1120 (640 English+480 Chinese) signature samples were used for training and 560 (320 English+240 Chinese) signature samples were used for testing the proposed system. An encouraging identification accuracy of 97.70% was obtained using gradient feature from the experiment.