Off-line handwritten signature detection by analysis of evidence accumulation

Abstract

One fundamental step in off-line handwritten signature verification is the detection of the signature position within the document image. This paper introduces an original approach for signature position detection. The method is based on an accumulative evidence technique, searching the region that maximizes some measure of correspondence with a given reference signature. This measure is based on the similarity of the slope marked out by each of the strokes in the signature. Experiments have shown that the method can be used on real documents, such as bank checks, where images have a high noise level due to background interferences (i.e. machine or handwritten texts, stamps, and lines). The proposed method is robust to variability in the size of the signatures and has the advantage of using only one reference signature per person.