A Preliminary Study on Various Off-line Hand Written Signature Verification Approaches

Biometrics can be classified into two broad categories— behavioral (signature verification, keystroke dynamics, etc.) and physiological (iris characteristics, fingerprint, etc.). Handwritten signature is amongst the first few biometrics to be used even before the advent of computers. Signature verification is widely studied and discussed using two approaches [5]. On-line approach uses an electronic tablet and a stylus connected to a computer to extract information about a signature and takes dynamic information like; pressure, velocity, etc whereas in offline approach stable dynamic variations are not used for verification purpose. Offline systems are more applicable and easy to use in comparison with on-line systems in many parts of the world however it is considered more difficult than on-line verification due to the lack of dynamic information. The paper presents a survey of off-line signature verification approaches being followed in different areas. This being a nascent area under research, the survey covers some of the examples of the ways