A Survey of State of the Art Methods Employed in the Offline Signature Verification Process

Handwritten signatures are of eminent importance in many business and legal activities around the world. That is, signatures have been used as authentication and verification measure for several centuries. However, the high relevance of signatures is accompanied with a certain risk of misuse. To mitigate this risk, automatic signature verification was proposed. Given a questioned signature, signature verification systems aim to distinguish between genuine and forged signatures. In the last decades, a large number of different signature verification frameworks have been proposed. Basically, these frameworks can be divided into online and offline approaches. In the case of online signature verification, temporal information about the writing process is available, while offline signature verification is limited to spatial information only. Hence, offline signature verification is generally regarded as the more challenging task. The present chapter reviews the field of offline signature verification and presents a comprehensive overview of methods typically employed in the general process of offline signature verification.