Offline Signature Verification Using Online Handwriting Registration

This paper proposes a novel framework for offline signature verification. Different from previous methods, our approach makes use of online handwriting instead of handwritten images for registration. The online registrations enable robust recovery of the writing trajectory from an input offline signature and thus allow effective shape matching between registration and verification signatures. In addition, we propose several new techniques to improve the performance of the new signature verification system: 1. we formulate and solve the recovery of writing trajectory within the framework of conditional random fields; 2. we propose a new shape descriptor, online context, for aligning signatures; 3. we develop a verification criterion which combines the duration and amplitude variances of handwriting. Experiments on a benchmark database show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the well-known offline signature verification methods and achieve comparable performance with online signature verification methods.