* Corresponding author.

Akriti Nigam
Elsevier Publications, 2013.
Robust OIIline Signature IdentiIication and VeriIication system
using Directional Chain Codes
Akriti Nigam
1,*
, Prateek Singh
2
, R.C. Tripathi
3
1
Research Scholar, Indian Institute Of Information Technology, Allahabad
2
M.Tech, Indian Institute Of Information Technology, Allahabad
3
Professor, Indian Institute Of Information Technology, Allahabad
Abstract
This paper proposes an eIIicient technique to develop an automated oIIline signature identiIication and veriIication system
that could help in crime prevention and biometric authentication systems. The technique proposed makes use oI directional
chain codes to compute a set oI Ieatures that are taken together as a combination. The Ieatures include the geometric details oI
the diIIerent strokes that compose a signature. It includes the length oI strokes, location oI transition points, intersection
points, and directions oI strokes, to name a Iew. The results speak Ior the eIIiciency oI the proposed system that achieves
accuracy level much better than many oI the published works.
2013 Elsevier Science. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Chain Codes; Digital Signatures; Signature Verification; Support Vector Machine; Probabilistic model
1. Introduction
DiIIerentiating between people is oIten done on the basis oI their handwriting and a speciIic reason Ior this
comparison oI handwriting is Ior signature veriIication. Signature is considered to be unique to every individual
and thus is a Iamous biometric, used Ior authentication in many legal issues.
Judicial courts oI many countries like India receive large number oI cases on signature Iorgeries which take lot
oI time to get resolved. This Iact motivated the commencement oI this proposed work. Appearance oI a signature
not only depends on the calligraphic sense but also on the mental state and intentions oI the signer.
Handwriting/signature experts use their knowledge and experience to detect whether a signature is original or
Iorged. Here in this paper an attempt has been made to emulate their knowledge and experience to design an
automated signature recognition and veriIication system.
On the basis oI acquisition, we have online and oIIline signature systems. Online systems require a digitizer
and a stylus to capture the signature. The additional inIormation that we gain through this method is the writing
speed and the pressure applied compared to the oIIline mode.
2. Literature Review
A lot oI research work has been done in this Iield oI signature veriIication covering almost every possible
technique. Some oI the major techniques used in the process oI signature identiIication and veriIication can be
Proceedings oI International ConIerence on Computing Sciences
WILKES100 ICCS 2013
ISBN: 978-93-5107-172-3

Akriti Nigam,Prateek Singh and R.C.Tripathi

Elsevier Publications, 2013.
categorized into those using global and local Ieatures separately |6,7| and those using a combination oI both these
Ieatures|1,2|.
In |1| Imran et.al. have used contours oI the handwritten text to recognize the writer oI a document. The
Ieatures extracted are both Irom global and local level. Chain codes oI the extracted contours are calculated
Iollowed by developing a histogram oI these chain codes. At local level oI analysis stroke direction histogram is
used.
In a similar work that computes global and local Ieatures oI signatures is mentioned in |2|. The prominent
Ieatures used are based on structure, statistics and geometry oI signature image. The local Ieatures capture the
internal and external shape oI contours to compare with the signature images in the database. Moving Irom
spatial to Irequency domain, Ismail et.al. |3| used a combination oI Fourier Descriptors and Chain codes to
develop signature identiIication mechanism that is invariant to scaling, rotation, translation and position oI start
point.
In |4|, Konstantinos et. al. exploited the pixel distribution inIormation to Iind the probabilities oI transitions in
diIIerent strokes, composing the signature. Juan et. al |5| used Real Adaboost algorithm Iollowed by
classiIication using Support Vector Machine (SVM). The results obtained are much better than other published
works.
Some oI the published works only used global Ieatures like |6| and |7|. In |6|, energy applied by the signer has
been quantiIied as a Ieature along with other geometrical details. Works in |8|, |9| and |10| have explored other
techniques like modiIied direction Ieature (MDF), detecting landmark points and their quantiIication and Hidden
Markov Models (HMM), respectively to achieve high levels oI recognition accuracy.
A signiIicant work in this regard has been shown in |11| |12| |13| using contourlet transIorm. They have used
a technique that employs contourlet transIorm to represent the edge details oI signatures by analyzing them in
diIIerent bands oI Irequency Iollowed by classiIication using SVM. Reduced size oI Ieature is an advantage oI
this technique.
When working in spatial domain, it is essential to employ a technique whose result does not vary with rotation. In
this direction Maraneta et. al.|14| have designed a signature veriIication system using circular grid overlays on
the signature image. Sectors are marked within the grids. The prominent Ieatures used are pixel density
distribution, gravity centre distance and gravity centre angle
3. Proposed Methodology
3.1 Database Description
Our database contains 940 genuine signature images and 600 Iorged version oI the genuine signature images
classiIied into 45 diIIerent groups
3.2 Preprocessing
To make the images Iit Ior processing we binarize the images and apply dilation to Iill the gaps and broken
necks Iollowed by thinning and pruning oI edges. All the images are slant normalized using Hotelling transIorm
to achieve rotation invariance. In this technique the Ioreground pixels are rotated in such a way that the major
orientation oI the Ioreground pixels becomes horizontal. Finally the images are normalized in size to obtain
scaling invariance. In this we scale the size oI input image to a Iixed size oI 128 X 128.
3.3 Feature Extraction
In this section we present the various Ieatures used and the ways to extract them, based on the hypothesis that
direction oI strokes in handwritten signatures preserves the writing style and variations in handwriting oI the
author.
Chain Code: is use to represent the direction oI the strokes in the signature. It is applied on single pixel width
strokes. It is based on 8-connectivity oI the pixels. In our method we compute chain code Ior each stroke oI the
signature. Using this method we also Iind the number oI strokes in the signature which also represents the

Robust ffline ignature dentification and erification system using irectional hain odes
Elsevier Publications, 2013.
number oI times the person has picked up his pen while making the signature. As even Ior genuine signatures the
length oI chain code will diIIer Ior each stroke, we normalize this count value Ior matching purpose.
Algorithm for feature extraction ()
1. Traverse the input image matrix in column major order and start with the Iirst end point pixel detected.
End Point- We call a pixel as the end point iI it has exactly one Ioreground pixel as its neighbour as
shown in the Fig 1 below. II (x,y) is the end point pixel then the neighbourhood Ioreground pixel can be
in exactly one oI the highlighted positions.
2. Move in the direction oI Ioreground pixels that occur in the 8-connected neighbourhood oI the input
pixel I(x,y).
3. Keep storing the direction value at each point traversed according to the 8 standard directions shown in
Fig 2.
Fig 1: End Points
Fig 2: Standard 8 Directions
4. Check Ior radical points.
Radical Points: We deIine three types oI radical points TriIid points (any point having three
neighbours), Intersection points (any point having Iour or more neighbours) and End points as shown in
Fig 3. For each radical points we store Iollowing three parameters: P(x,y,type)
where x and y represents the coordinates oI the radical points, and type represents the type oI radical
points.
II a radical point occurs then check the directions oI last Iew pixels (we chose a threshold oI 10
pixels) and choose the next pixel which is in the same direction. We can have two scenarios as
described below-
a. We do not get any TriIid point till we reached the end point. In this scenario we will keep
traversing the stroke till the end point is reached.
b. We get one or more TriIid point in the path till we reached the end point. In this case aIter
reaching the end point we will backtrack to the last seen TriIid point and continue in the
unmarked pixels direction. We continue this process till we reach an end point.

Akriti Nigam,Prateek Singh and R.C.Tripathi

Elsevier Publications, 2013.
Fig 3: The Red circles represent the End Points, the Blue circles represent the Intersection points and the Green circle represents the
TriIid point.
5. While computing the chain codes we also compute Iollowing Ieatures-
a. Number of strokes: We maintain a counter which will count the number oI strokes in the input
signature.
b. Length of stroke: Length oI each stroke is calculated by counting the number oI pixels in each
stroke.
c. Transition Points: Transition points are the points where a stroke changes direction i.e. a point
where the direction oI the previous Iive pixels is diIIerent Irom the direction oI the next Iive
pixels. For each transition point we store Iollowing values-
i. Count of Transition Points: We count the number oI transition points in each stroke.
ii. Location of Transition Points: Location oI transition points is deIined as the proportion
oI the relative positions oI the transition points and the image height or width.
iii. Direction of Transition Points
d. Count of radical points: We count the number oI radical points oI each type in each stroke.
e. Distance between corresponding radical points: Distance between each type oI radical points
is calculated by counting the number oI Ioreground pixels oI the stroke occurring between
them.
I. Aspect Ratio for each stroke: It is deIined as the ratio oI the width and height oI the
rectangular box which encloses the stroke pattern.
g. Length of Loops: Loop in a stroke is deIined as a point where the starting point and the ending
point are same. The starting and ending points can be TriIid points or Intersection points only.
Length oI a loop is calculated by counting the number oI pixels Irom starting point to the end
point. This Ieature is calculated Ior the signature as a whole.
h. Number of Loops: Number oI loops is also calculated Ior the signature as a whole. It is
calculated by counting the number oI loops present in the signature.
The above mentioned pre-processing and Ieature extraction algorithm is applied during training phase on all
the database images as well as on the query image, so that we get a set oI 10 histograms Ior each Ieature Ior all
class oI images in the database and the Ieature set Ior the query image.
Signature Recognition: During signature recognition we try to Iind out to which class or to which person the
signature belongs. For this there are various techniques that can be used such as Neural Network, Support Vector
Machine, k-NN etc. In this paper we have used SVM Ior signature recognition as it is Iound to give most
accuracy. SVM is a pattern classiIication technique used to solve multi-class problems. In this technique we Iind
a hyper plane which distinguishes two classes and maximises the distance between the hyper plane and either oI
the classes. The vectors which are nearest to the hyper plane are called 'support vectors'. SVM uses a kernel
Iunction which is most suitable Ior the type oI data. In this paper Gaussian kernel SVM is used. SVM classiIier is
deIined as shown in equation 1.
F(x) _j aj xj.x b ..... (1)

Robust ffline ignature dentification and erification ystem using irectional hain odes
Elsevier Publications, 2013.
where we have a training database oI N data: xn , n1,.,N}
xj} are the set oI support vectors and the parameters aj and b are determined by solving a quadratic problem.
Signature Verification Algorithm: Here we have to decide whether the query signature image is a genuine
one or Iorged. On the basis oI the experiment we have assigned diIIerent weights to each oI the Ieatures on the
basis oI their signiIicance in veriIication process. So Ior each Ieature Fi we have assigned a weight Wi. Now Ior
signature veriIication process a probabilistic model is used where Ior the query signature image, the probability
oI every Ieature is calculated based upon the histogram obtained in the training phase oI the corresponding
Ieature. We now combine the probability value with the weights assigned to each Ieature to calculate the score oI
the query image using the Iollowing equation
Score (S) Pi * Wi ..... (2)
Decision on whether the query signature is genuine or Iorged is based upon a preset threshold value T. II the
score S is greater than T then we declare the signature to be genuine else we declare it as Iorged.
4. Experimental Results
To test the perIormance oI the proposed system we have used the error rate metric. For each query signature
image we have around 20 genuine signature images to train the system. We have given the query image Irom 5
diIIerent classes and Iirst checked the error rate in the recognition phase i.e. the percentage oI times the system
gives wrong classiIication result.
Next we check Ior each query signature its genuineness. The error rate in veriIication process signiIies the
percentage oI times a genuine signature is declared as Iorged or vice versa. The error obtained Ior each oI the 5
query images is tabulated below in table 1 Ior both recognition and veriIication process.
Table 1: Error Percentage obtained Ior each query image during recognition and veriIication
Error
during
recognition
Error
during
veriIication
Class 1 2.8 3.5
Class 2 3.2 3.9
Class 3 2.1 3.1
Class 4 2.8 4.2
Class 5 2.5 3.2
In table 2, a comparison oI the error obtained using the proposed method with some oI the time honoured
techniques has been made. Noticeable here is the Iact that the proposed method achieves lower percentage oI
error in comparison to other techniques tabulated which proves Ior the genuineness oI the proposed approach.
Table 2: VeriIication PerIormance Comparison
Techniques Error
Proposed approach 3.2
Graphical Model |9| 5.43
Contour based approach |1| 3.34
Global Approach|2| 9.0
ModiIied Direction Feature |6| 17.25

Akriti Nigam,Prateek Singh and R.C.Tripathi

Elsevier Publications, 2013.
Gradient Feature|8| 15.03
Hidden Markov Model|9| 6.4
5. Conclusion
In this work, a robust tool has been deIined Ior recognition and veriIication oI signatures using directional
chain codes. Several Ieatures have been identiIied that help to diIIerentiate a genuine signature Irom a Iorged one.
A probabilistic model has been used to decide Ior the genuinity. The error obtained is seen to be lower than
many Iamous techniques which speak Ior the eIIectiveness oI the proposed tool.
6. References
|1| Imran Siddiqi, Nicole Vincent. A Set oI Chain Code Based Features Ior Writer Recognition. In: 10
th
IEEE International Conference on
Document Analysis and Recognition, pp 981-985, 2009.
|2| Y. Rekik, N. Houmani, M.A. El Yacoubi, S. Garcia-Salicetti, and B. Dorizzi. A Comparison oI Feature Extraction Approaches Ior OIIline
Signature VeriIication. In: IEEE, International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems (ICMCS), pp 1-6, 2011.
|3| Ismail A. Ismail 1, Mohamed A. Ramadan , Talaat S. El-DanaI And Ahmed H. Samak. An EIIicient OII-line Signature IdentiIication
Method Based On Fourier Descriptor and Chain Codes. In: International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security (IJCSNS),
Vol.10 No.5, 2010.
|4| Konstantinos Tselios, Elias N. Zois, Athanasios Nassiopoulos, George Economou. Fusion oI Directional Transitional Features Ior OIILine
Signature VeriIication. In: IEEE Biometrics, International Joint Conference on Biometrics Compendium (IJCB), pp 1-6, 2011.
|5| Juan Hu, Youbin Chen. Fusion oI Features and ClassiIiers Ior OII-line Handwritten Signature VeriIication. In: First Asian Conference on
Pattern Recognition (ACPR), pp 174-178, 2011.
|6| Vu Nguyen, Michael Blumenstein, Graham Leedham. Global Features Ior the OII-Line Signature VeriIication Problem. In: 10th IEEE
International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp 1300-1304, 2009.
|7|RamachandraA C, Jyothi Srinivasa Rao, K B Raja, K R Venugopla, L M Patnaik. Robust OIIline Signature VeriIication Based On Global
Features. In: IEEE International Advance Computing Conference, pp 1173-1178, 2009.
|8| Vu Nguyen, Yumiko Kawazoe, Tetsushi Wakabayashi, Umapada Pal, and Michael Blumenstein. PerIormance Analysis oI the Gradient
Feature and the ModiIied Direction Feature Ior OII-line Signature VeriIication. In: 12th International Conference on Frontiers in
Handwriting Recognition, pp 303-307, 2010.
|9| Hairong Lv, Xinxin Bai, Wenjun Yin, Jin Dong. OII-line Signature VeriIication Using Graphical Model. In: International Conference on
Pattern Recognition, pp3784-3788, 2010.
|10| Hai Rong Lv, Wen Jun Yin, Jin Dong. OII-line signature veriIication based on deIormable grid partition and hidden markov models. In:
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, pp 374-377, 2009.
|11| Assia Hamadene, YouceI Chibani and Hassiba Nemmour,. OII-line Handwritten Signature VeriIication Using Contourlet TransIorm and
Co-occurrence Matrix. In: IEEE International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, pp 343-347, 2012.
|12| Elaheh Soleymanpour, Boshra Rajae, Hamid Reza Pourreza,. OIIline Handwritten Signature IdentiIication and VeriIication Using
Contourlet TransIorm and Support Vector Machine. In: 6
th
IEEE Iranian Machine Vision and Image Processing (MVIP), pp 1-6, 2010.
|13| Muhammad Reza Pourshahabi, Mohamad Hoseyn Sigari, Hamid Reza Pourreza. OIIline Handwritten Signature IdentiIication and
VeriIication Using Contourlet TransIorm. In: IEEE, International Conference of Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition, pp 670-673, 2009.
|14| Marianela Parodi Juan C. Gomez, Abdel Belaid. A Circular Grid-Based Rotation Invariant Feature Extraction Approach Ior OII-line
Signature VeriIication. In: IEEE International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp 1289-1293, 2011.

Index

F
Fourier descriptors, 130

H
Hidden Markov Model (HMM), 130

M
Modified direction feature (MDF), 130

P
Probabilistic model, 133

R
Real adaboost algorithm, 130

S
Signature verification, 129
chain codes, 130
database description, 130
end points, 131
error percentage, 133
feature extraction, 130133
preprocessing, 130
standard 8 directions, 131
verification performance comparison, 133
Standard 8 directions, 131
Support vector machine (SVM), 130, 132
SVM. see Support vector machine (SVM)