Multilingual Handwritten Signature Recognition Based on High-Dimensional Feature Fusion

Abstract

Handwritten signatures have traditionally been used as a common form of recognition and authentication in tasks such as financial transactions and document authentication. However, there are few studies on minority languages such as Uyghur and Kazakh used in Xinjiang, China, and no available public dataset for these scripts, which are widely used in banking and other fields. Therefore, this paper addresses this problem by constructing a dataset containing Uyghur, Kazakh, and Han languages and presents an automatic handwritten signature recognition approach based on Uyghur, Kazakh, Han, and public datasets. In the paper, a handwritten signature recognition method that combines local maximum occurrence features (LOMO) and histogram of orientated gradients (HOG) features was proposed. LOMO features use a sliding window to represent the local features of the signature image. The high-dimensional features formed by the combination of these methods are dimensionally reduced by principal component analysis (PCA). The classification is performed using k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and it is compared with the random forest method. The proposed method achieved a recognition rate of 98.4% using a diverse signature database compared with existing methods. It shows that the method was effective and can be applied to large datasets of mixed, multilingual signatures.

Keywords

• local maximal occurrence representation (LOMO)
• histogram of oriented gradients (HOG)
• multilingual offline signature
• k-nearest neighbors (k-NN)
• sliding window