Online signature verification using a new extreme points warping technique

Abstract

There are two common methodologies to verify signatures: the functional approach and the parametric approach. In this paper, we propose a new warping technique for the functional approach in signature verification. The commonly used warping technique is dynamic time warping (DTW). It was originally used in speech recognition and has been applied in the field of signature verification with some success since two decades ago. The new warping technique we propose is named as extreme points warping (EPW). It proves to be more adaptive in the field of signature verification than DTW, given the presence of the forgeries. Instead of warping the whole signal as DTW does, EPW warps a set of selected important points. With the use of EPW, the equal error rate is improved by a factor of 1.3 and the computation time is reduced by a factor of 11.