A General Approach to Off-line Signature Verification

Although automatic off-line signature verification has been extensively studied in the last three decades, there are still a huge number of open questions and even the best systems are still struggling to get better error rates than 5%. This paper targets some of the weak spots of the research area, which are comparability, measurability and interoperability of different signature verification systems. After delivering an overview of some of the main research directions, this paper proposes a generic representation of signature verifiers. In the first part of the paper it is shown how existing verification systems compare to the generic model, detailing the differences and their resolutions. In the second part a signature verification framework is introduced, which was created based on the generic model. It is demonstrated how existing algorithms and even an existing signature verifier can be modularized and modified to allow an execution through the framework. Finally the benefits of the model are outlined including the unified benchmarking, comparability of different systems and the support for distributed software architectures like SOA. Key-Words: signature verification; off-line; unified model; component based; loose coupling