Online handwritten signature verification

In this chapter, we first provide an overview of the existing main approaches, databases, evaluation campaigns and the remaining challenges in online handwritten signature verification. We then propose a new benchmarking framework for online signature verification by introducing the concepts of Reference Systems, Reference Databases and associated Reference Protocols. Finally, we present the results of several approaches within the proposed evaluation framework. Among them are also present the best approaches within the first international Signature Verification Competition held in 2004 (SVC'2004), Dynamic Time Warping and Hidden Markov Models. All these systems are evaluated first within the benchmarking framework and also with other relevant protocols. Experiments are also reported on two different databases (BIOMET and MCYT) showing the impact of time variability for online signature verification. The two reference systems presented in this chapter are also used and evaluated in the BMEC'2007 evaluation campaign, presented in Chap11.