An Offline Signature Verification and Forgery Detection Method Based on a Single Known Sample and an Explainable Deep Learning Approach

Abstract

Signature verification is one of the biometric techniques frequently used for personal identification. In many commercial scenarios, such as bank check payment, the signature verification process is based on human examination of a single known sample. Although there is extensive research on automatic signature verification, yet few attempts have been made to perform the verification based on a single reference sample. In this paper, we propose an off-line handwritten signature verification method based on an explainable deep learning method (deep convolutional neural network, DCNN) and unique local feature extraction approach. We use the open-source dataset, Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2011 SigComp, to train our system and verify a questioned signature as genuine or a forgery. All samples used in our testing process are collected from a new author whose signatures are not present in the training or other stages. From the experimental results, we get the accuracy between 94.37% and 99.96%, false rejection rate (FRR) between 5.88% and 0%, false acceptance rate (FAR) between 0.22% and 5.34% in our testing dataset.

Keywords

• handwritten signature verification
• signature examination
• convolutional neural network (CNN)
• explainable deep learning
• forensic science