Do You Need More Data? The DeepSignDB On-Line Handwritten Signature Biometric Database

Abstract

Data have become one of the most valuable things in this new era where deep learning technology seems to overcome traditional approaches. However, in some tasks, such as the verification of handwritten signatures, the amount of publicly available data is scarce, what makes difficult to test the real limits of deep learning. In addition to the lack of public data, it is not easy to evaluate the improvements of novel approaches compared with the state of the art as different experimental protocols and conditions are usually considered for different signature databases. To tackle all these mentioned problems, the main contribution of this study is twofold: i) we present and describe the new DeepSignDB on-line handwritten signature biometric public database, and ii) we propose a standard experimental protocol and benchmark to be used for the research community in order to perform a fair comparison of novel approaches with the state of the art. The DeepSignDB database is obtained through the combination of some of the most popular on-line signature databases, and a novel dataset not presented yet. It comprises more than 70K signatures acquired using both stylus and finger inputs from a total of 1526 users. Two acquisition scenarios are considered, office and mobile, with a total of 8 different devices. Additionally, different types of impostors and number of acquisition sessions are considered along the database. The DeepSignDB and benchmark results are available in GitHub.