A Signature Recognition Technique With a Powerful Verification Mechanism Based on CNN and PCA

In this paper, we embed a signature verification mechanism in a previously introduced architecture for signature recognition to detect in-distribution and out-of-distribution random forgeries. In the previous architecture, a CNN was trained on the genuine user training dataset and then used as a feature extraction module. A k-NN algorithm with cosine distance was then used to classify the unknown signatures based on the nearest cosine distance neighbor. This architecture led to higher than 99% accuracy, but without verification, because any unknown signature will converge to one of the identities of the training dataset’s users. To add a verification mechanism that differentiates between genuine and random forgeries, we use PCA to select the most discriminating features used in calculating the cosine distance between the training and testing signatures. A fixed parameter thresholding technique based on the training distances is introduced that best differentiates between the genuine and random-user signatures. Moreover, enhancement of the technique is carried out by combining the output of the Softmax layer and the last convolution layer of the ResNet18 model to get a highly discriminative representation of the handwritten signatures. Accordingly, the introduced verification mechanism resulted in very low false positive and negative rates for test signatures from inside and outside the main dataset, with an insignificant decrease in the high identification accuracy. The complete architecture has been tested on three publicly available datasets, showing superior results.