A Review of Offline Signature Verification Techniques

Abstract

Among various biometric modalities, signature verification remains one of the most widely used methods to authenticate the identity of an individual. Signature verification, the most important component of behavioral biometrics, has attracted significant research attention over the last three decades. Despite extensive research, the problem still remains open to research due to the variety of challenges it offers. The high intra-class variations in signatures resulting from different physical or mental states of the signer, the differences that appear with aging and the visual similarity in case of skilled forgeries etc. are only a few of the challenges to name. This paper is intended to provide a review of the recent advancements in offline signature verification with a discussion on different types of forgeries, the features that have been investigated for this problem and the classifiers employed. The pros and cons of notable recent contributions to this problem have also been presented along with a discussion of potential future research directions on this subject.