Graph embedding for offline handwritten signature verification

Abstract

Due to the high availability and applicability, handwritten signatures are an eminent biometric authentication measure in our life. To mitigate the risk of a potential misuse, automatic signature verification tries to distinguish between genuine and forged signatures. Most of the available signature verification approaches make use of vectorial rather than graph-based representations of the handwriting. This is rather surprising as graphs offer some inherent advantages. Graphs are, for instance, able to directly adapt their size and structure to the size and complexity of the respective handwritten entities. Moreover, several fast graph matching algorithms have been proposed recently that allow to employ graphs also in domains with large amounts of data. The present paper proposes to use different graph embedding approaches in conjunction with a recent graph-based signature verification framework. That is, signature graphs are not directly matched with each other, but first compared with a set of predefined prototype graphs, in order to obtain a dissimilarity representation. In an experimental evaluation, we employ the proposed method on two widely used benchmark datasets. On both datasets, we empirically confirm that the learning-free graph embedding outperforms state-of-the-art methods with respect to both accuracy and runtime.