Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

IIT Roorkee.

Seminar report on

Application of image processing in

Biometric Verification
Submitted by,
Pradyumna Paliwal
Enrolment number: 10213012
Course: IDD ECW (5th year)
Supervisor :
Dr.Debashis Ghosh,
Associate Professor,
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, IIT Roorkee

Abstract
Biometrics is a pattern recognition problem for automatic
recognition or verification of an individuals identity based on a
feature vector(s) derived from their physiological and/or behavioural
characteristic. Biometric systems should provide a reliable personal
recognition/verification which cannot be fooled by fraudulent
impostors. Handwritten signature is a common biometric used to
authenticate financial transactions including cheques, credit card
validation etc. or to sanction the contents of a document like
certificates, contracts etc... As a biometric system relies on what you
are or what you do rather than what you possess (a Personal
Identification Number or a Password) to establish the identity of the
individual, it is much more robust than other traditional
recognition/verification schemes. In this report, a brief overview of
biometric methods will be presented. Major focus will be on
signature verification.

Contents
1. Introduction
........................................................................... 4
2. Biometric Systems .......................................................................... 5
3. Signature Verification System ..................................... 9
4. Features in signature verification ............................................. 11
5. Signature Feature Matching ............................................................. 13
6. Conclusion
................................................................................... 19
7. References
....................................................................... 20

1. Introduction
With the proliferation of information and communication technologies, the humanmachine interaction has become a matter of routine in modern day to day life. We are
interacting with machines at work place, at leisure, during travel, at home or any other
place. All our day to day transactions are being conducted through various
interconnected electronic devices. Many of these transactions require authenticated
access for security reasons. In order to protect all these transactions from various
fraudulent practices it is very important to come up with a method so that the machine
we interact with to complete the transaction can establish the identity of individuals.
Traditional approaches rely on what you possess like Personal Identification Number
or ID card but approaches like these are not sufficiently reliable to satisfy the security
requirements of electronic transactions because they lack the capability to differentiate
between a genuine individual and impostor who fraudulently acquires the access
privilege. Biometrics, which refers to the identity of the individual based on his/her
physiological or behavioural characteristics, relies on something which you are or
what you do to make personal identification and, therefore, inherently has the
capability to differentiate between a genuine individual and a fraudulent impostor [1].
A Biometric system depends on pattern recognition/classification techniques to
establish the identity of an individual. Pattern Recognition techniques assign a
physical object or an event to one of the pre-specified categories. The pattern
recognition problem is difficult because various sources of noise distort the patterns,
and often within a class there is substantial variability in patterns.
Every Pattern recognition based Biometric system has two major objectives:
i.

To select appropriate features from raw biometric data. Feature extraction can
be stated as the problem of extracting from the raw data, the information which
is most relevant for classification purposes, in the sense of minimizing the
within-class pattern variability while enhancing the between class pattern
variability [2].

ii.

To develop a decision-making approach that uses the feature vector extracted

from data to classify data accurately. A perfect classification performance is
often impossible, a more general task is to determine the probability for each of
the possible categories.

For a biometric system to be practical and to be used in commercial applications it

should have high recognition accuracy, speed, and resource requirements should me
minimal, be harmless to the users, be accepted by the intended population, and be
sufficiently robust to various fraudulent methods and attacks to the system.

2. Biometric Systems
A biometric system which is essentially a pattern recognition system uses the
physiological or behavioural characteristics of an individual to recognize the person.
A feature vector is extracted from the biometric data collected from the individual
being enrolled in the system and is stored in the system database as a template for
future queries. Depending on the application context, a biometric system may operate
either in verification mode or identification mode. While identification involves
comparing the acquired biometric information against templates corresponding to all
users in the database, verification involves comparison with only those templates
corresponding to the claimed identity. This implies that identification and verification
are two problems that should be dealt with separately.
In the verification problem we consider two categories or classes w1 and w2, where w1
indicates that the claim is true (a genuine user) and w2 indicates that the claim is false
(an impostor). Each pattern is described by a feature vector X Rd. An input feature
vector XQ is extracted from biometric data of the individual being tested and the
individual specifies the claimed identity I. Now the verification problem is to
determine if (I, XQ) belongs to class w1 or w2. Typically, XQ is matched against, the
biometric template corresponding to user I, to determine its category. Thus

(I, XQ) = w1, if S (XQ, XI) t

= w2, otherwise
Where S is the function that measures the similarity between feature vectors XQ and
XI, and t is a predefined threshold. The value S (XQ, XI) is termed as a similarity or
matching score between the biometric measurements of the user and the claimed
identity. Therefore, every claimed identity is classified into w1 or w2 based on the
variables XQ, I, XI and t and the function S. Note that biometric measurements (e.g.,
signatures) of the same individual taken at different times are almost never identical.
This is the reason for introducing the threshold t.
Some commonly used similarity metrics in pattern recognition are correlation,
Euclidean distance, Mahalanobis distance, Hausdorff metric etc.
In the identification problem, there are N users enrolled in the system. We consider
N+1 categories Ck, k= {1, 2 N, N+1}. C1, C2 CN are the identities enrolled in the
system and CN+1 represents the rejected case. Now given an input feature vector XQ,
we determine the class Ck, k= {1, 2 N, N+1}. We measure the similarity metric
between XQ and feature vector corresponding to each person enrolled in the system. If
none of the measured similarity metric is greater than the threshold then the
questioned individual is rejected on the other hand if there are multiple similarity
metric greater than the threshold then the one with the greatest similarity metric is
chosen to be the class of questioned individual. Hence

XQ = Ck if max {S (XQ, XCk)} t, k = 1, 2 N

= CN+1 otherwise
Where XIk is the biometric template corresponding to identity, and t is a predefined
threshold.
Two samples of the same biometric characteristic from the same person (e.g., two
signatures of the same person) are not exactly the same, changes in the users
physiological or behavioural characteristics , ambient conditions (e.g., temperature
and humidity), and users interaction with the sensor. Therefore, the decision problem
has to be posed in probabilistic terms. We assume that there is some a priori
probability P (w1) that the individual belongs to class w1 and some a priori probability
P (w2) that the individual belongs to class w2. If w1 and w2 are the only classes then
the sum of P (w1) and P (w2) is one. These prior probabilities reflect our prior
knowledge of likely we are to get individuals belonging to each class. Suppose we
have to make decision about the class of the individual assuming the same cost or
consequence on making an error for both the classes then the only information that we
are allowed to use is the value of the priori probabilities. The decision rule in this case
will be: Decide w1 if P (w1) > P (w2) and w2 if P (w2) > P (w1).
The response of a biometric matching system is the matching scores (typically a single
number) that quantifies the similarity between the input (XQ) and the template (XI)
representations. Suppose that we know both the prior probabilities P (wj) and the
conditional probability densities p (s | wj) for j=1, 2. Now the joint probability density
that of finding a pattern that is in category wj and has the matching score s can be
written as p (wj, s) = P (wj | s)p(s). Rearranging these terms leads to Bayes formula:

Bayes formula shows that by observing the value of s we can convert the prior
probability P (wj) to the a posteriori probability P (wj | s), the probability of that the
individual belongs to class wj given that similarity measured is s.
For a given s we can minimize the probability of error by deciding w1 if P (w1|x) and
w2 otherwise. This is called Bayes Decision Rule [3].
The Biometric system decision is regulated by the threshold t. The threshold is chosen
such that it satisfies the Bayes Decision Rule. The pairs of biometric samples
generating scores higher than or equal to t are inferred as mate pairs (i.e., belonging to
the same person); pairs of biometric samples generating scores lower than t are
inferred as non-mate pairs (i.e., belonging to different persons). The distribution of
scores generated from pairs of samples from the same person is called the genuine
distribution and from different persons is called the impostor distribution.
6

The probabilities associated with the four possible outcomes of the system:
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.

P (s>t | XQ w1): a hit, the probability that the similarity measure is greater
than the threshold and the individual is a genuine user.
P (s>t | XQ w2): a miss, the probability that the similarity measure is greater
than the threshold but the individual is not a genuine user.
P (s<t | XQ w1): a false rejection, the probability that the similarity measure is
less than the threshold but the individual is a genuine user.
P (s<t | XQ w2): a correct rejection, the probability that the similarity measure
is less than the threshold and the individual is not a genuine user.

As it can be seen from four possible outcomes the biometric verification systems
outcome can be erroneous in two cases:
1. When the biometric measurements from two different persons are misjudged to

be from same person. This type of error is called false match or a miss.
2. When the biometric measurements from the same person are judged to

belonging to different persons. This type of error is called false non-match or a

false rejection.
On increasing the threshold the biometric system becomes more stringent in accepting
the individual to be genuine and becomes more secure, thus the false match or false
accepts rate goes down but false reject rate goes up. Similarly on decreasing the
threshold the biometric system becomes less stringent, more tolerant to input
variations, the false reject rate goes down but the false match rate goes up. So there is
a trade-off between false match rate and false accept rate in every biometric system.
To study the system performance at different values of threshold a receiver operating
characteristics (ROC) curve is drawn as shown in figure 1(b). A ROC curve is a plot
of false match rate (FMR) against false non-match rate (FNMR) for various threshold
values.
Mathematically, the errors in a verification system can be formulated as follows. If the
stored biometric template of the user is I represented by XI and the acquired input for
recognition is represented by XQ, then the null and alternate hypotheses are:
H0
H1

input does not come from the same person as the template XI;
input comes from the same person as the template XI.

The associated decisions are as follows:

D0
D1

person is not who she claims to be;

person is who she claims to be.

The decision rule is as follows. If the matching score is less than the system threshold,
then decide D0, else decide. The above terminology is borrowed from communication
theory, where the goal is to detect a message in the presence of noise. H0 is the
hypothesis that the received signal is noise alone; and H1 is the hypothesis that the
received signal is message plus the noise. Such a hypothesis testing formulation
inherently contains two types of errors [1].
Type I: false match (D1 is decided when H0 is true);
Type II: false non-match (D0 is decided when H1 is true).
FMR is the probability of type-I error (also called significance level in hypothesis
testing) and FNMR is the probability of type-II error as
FMR = P (D1|H0)
FNMR = P (D0|H1)

Figure 1. Biometric system error rates. (a) FMR and FNMR for a given threshold t are displayed
over the genuine and impostor score distributions; FMR is the percentage of non-match pairs
whose matching scores are greater than or equal to t, and FNMR is the percentage of mate pairs
whose matching scores are less than t. (b) Choosing different operating points results in different
FMR and FNMR. The curve relating FMR to FNMR at different thresholds is referred to as receiver
operating characteristics (ROC). Typical operating points of different biometric applications are
displayed on an ROC curve. Lack of understanding of the error rates is a primary source of
confusion in assessing system accuracy in vendor/user communities a like [1].

3. Signature verification system

Handwritten signature verification has been extensively studied over past few years.
Handwritten signatures are very commonly used to authenticate financial transactions
including cheques, credit card validation etc. or to sanction the contents of a document
like certificates, contracts etc. Signature verification is normally done by visual
inspection. A person compares the appearance of the signature presented to him with a
template signature stored in his database and accepts the signature if he finds them to
be sufficiently similar. This process requires a lot of time and effort to manually verify
the signatures. Due to the time and effort required, no verification is done at all in
majority of the situations. If computers can be made intelligent enough to understand
human handwritings it will be possible to make man-computer interfaces more
ergonomic and attractive and thus will solve our problem.
The Handwritten signature is a behavioural biometric attribute. Using Signature as a
biometric for authentication has several advantages compared with other biometrics
like fingerprint, face, voice etc. These other biometrics requires relatively expensive
hardware to capture the image on the other hand capturing a signature does not require
much expensive hardware. An important advantage of signature as a biometric is that
it is already socially accepted and has been used in civilian applications for decades
while other methods like fingerprints still have stigma of being associated with
criminal investigation. However we do not know that every individual has a unique
signature but still it is generally accepted. Signature verification can be applied only
when a person is conscious and knowingly provides his signature while other
biometrics like fingerprint can be acquired fraudulently. In spite of all these
advantages signature verification is very difficult pattern recognition problem. The
variation in the signatures of the same person can be very large; this is called intraclass variation. In addition, a persons signature often changes a lot during their life
time. This is not the case with other biometrics which does not have much intra class
variation.
On the basis of the data acquisition method there are two major methods of signature
verification: offline method and online method.

3.1 On-line signature verification system

On-line verification refers to the methods and techniques dealing with automatic
verification of a signature as it is written using a digitizer or an instrumented stylus
that captures information about the pen tip, generally its position, velocity, or
acceleration as a function of time [4].
On-line signatures are considered more robust and reliable as compared to off-line
signature verification system because they take into account the dynamic features like
pressure and velocity of pen tip in addition to spatial (derived from x, y coordinates)
features. Dynamic features are more complex and difficult for an imposter to imitate.
A typical on-line signature verification system is made up of following modules: data
9

acquisition, pre-processing, feature extraction, training and verification [5] as shown

in figure [2].

Figure 2. A typical on-line signature verification system [5].

3.2 Off-line signature verification system

The off-line method uses an optical scanner to obtain signature written on paper.
Signature verification in off-line systems is more difficult than in on-line systems
because a lot of dynamic information is lost. Hence, on-line signature verification is
generally more successful. Nevertheless, off-line systems have a significant advantage
in that they do not require access to special processing devices when the signatures are
produced. In fact, if the accuracy of verification could be promoted greatly, the offline method has much more practical application areas than that of the on-line one.
The process of off-line signature verification often consists of a learning stage and a
testing stage. The purpose of the former is to create a reference file, and that of the
latter is to compute the similarities between the testing and its corresponding reference
signature to check whether the tested signature is genuine [6].

10

4. Features in signature verification

Selection of appropriate features that minimize the intra-class variation and maximize
the inter-class variation is the one of most important part of all pattern recognition
systems. Different feature extraction methods fulfil this requirement of extracting the
most pertinent information to a variable degree, depending on the pattern recognition
problem and available data. A feature extraction method that is useful in a particular
application might not be useful in other applications.
The extracted features must be invariant to various distortions and variations expected
in the signature of the same person. Also according to the curse of dimensionality,
with a limited training set the dimensionality of features should be kept low in order to
get good generalization performance. A rule of thumb is to use five to ten times as
many training samples of each class as the dimensionality of feature vector [7].
In order to recognize many variations of the signature of the same person, features that
are invariant to certain transformations on the signature need to be used. Invariant
features are those which have approximately the same values for samples of the
signature of the same person that have been translated, scaled, rotated, stretched,
skewed etc.
For some features extraction methods, the signature can be reconstructed from the
extracted feature. This property is called re-constructability [7]. Re-constructability
ensures that complete information about the signature shape is present in the extracted
feature.

4.1 Geometric Features

Geometric features based on polar coordinates have been proposed in [8]. In this
method first a few equidistant point are chosen on the envelope of the signature, then
three set of features are extracted from the points on the envelope of the signature:
radius, angle and the number of black pixels of the signature strokes the radius crosses
when sweeping from one contour sample to the next as shown in figure 3. This
method of feature extraction is rotation invariant. Also if we use the ratio of adjacent
samples on the contour rather than their absolute value then this method is also scale
invariant.

4.2 Shape descriptors

A signature can be considered as a symbol or pattern of shapes, therefore shape
descriptors can be used to extract meaningful features from the signature pattern.
There are many shape representations and retrieval methods. Shape retrieval involves
three primary issues: shape representation, shape similarity measure and shape
indexing [9]. The shape description methods can be classified into two categories:
region based versus contour based.
11

In region based shape description techniques, all the points within the shape are
considered to obtain the shape description or representation. These techniques
generally use moment descriptors to describe shape. Moments and functions of
moments have been utilized in a number of applications to achieve invariant
recognition of two dimensional image patterns [10]. The most common moments used
are geometric moments, Zernike moments, Legendre moments etc. Region moment
representation of the shape interprets a normalized grey level image function as a
probability density of a 2D random variable. Moments capture the global information
such as overall orientation, elongation etc. missing from many pure contour based
representations. Just like Fourier series the first few terms of the moment capture the
more general shape properties while the higher terms capture the finer detail.
Contour based shape description techniques use only the boundary data of the shape.
Contour based methods can be classified as: global descriptors, shape signatures, and
spectral descriptors [9]. Global descriptors such as area, circularity, eccentricity, axis
orientation can only be used to discriminate shapes with large dissimilarities; therefore
it is suitable only for filtering process. Shape signatures are essentially local
representations of shape features. Common shape signatures are complex coordinates,
curvature and angular representations etc., they are very sensitive to noise and are not
robust. They also require large computation during similarity measure. Therefore
these local representations require further processing using spectral transforms such as
Fourier transform and wavelet transform. Spectral descriptors such as Fourier
descriptor and wavelet descriptor are usually derived from shape signatures by taking
their Fourier transform and wavelet transform respectively. In Fourier descriptor the
first few low frequency terms capture the coarse information of the contour while the
higher frequency terms capture the finer detail of the contour. The advantage of
wavelet descriptor over Fourier descriptor is that wavelet descriptor achieve
localization in both space and frequency domain simultaneously. However, the
wavelet transform require intensive calculation in the matching stage.

.
Figure 3. The signature and its envelope with the values of area, angle and number of black pixels
associated with each sample on the contour [8].

12

5. Signature Feature Matching

After the extraction of meaningful features from the signature sample, a method is to
chosen to compare the features of the test signature and template signature. A number
of techniques and their variations have been applied to implement a signature
verification system resilient to forgery by fraudulent impostors. Some of these
techniques are Template matching [11], Bayesian Learning [12], Hidden Markov
Model (HMM) [13], Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) [15], Graph Matching [16],
combination of classifiers [17] etc. In this section all these techniques are discussed.

5.1 Template matching approach

Template matching approach is one of the simplest and earliest approaches to pattern
recognition. Matching is a generic operation in pattern recognition, which is used to
determine the similarity between two entities. It has been shown in [11] that a pattern
matching method is able to achieve a good verification performance for Japanese
signature. However, the two instances of a signature vary in stroke widths. The
similarity between two signatures obtained by a pattern matching method is affected
by their stroke widths. The stroke widths vary with the pen used for signing. To solve
this problem, it is effective to first normalize the width of signature before matching.
Based on these considerations a new pattern matching method was proposed for
Japanese signature verification in [11]. In this modified pattern matching method, the
strokes of signatures are first thinned at one pixel width, and then thinned signatures
are blurred by a fixed point-spread function. Successively the similarity between
registered and examined signatures is calculated. The average error rate of method is
9.1%, while the average rate of the conventional method is 19.2%.

5.2 Bayesian Learning Approach

When multiple signature samples of a person are available it is logical to learn
collectively from these signature samples specific to the writer. This kind of learning
focuses on the specific writer and answers whether the anonymous person who
presents his signature is the same person whose signature model has learned. In this
approach first the genuine samples of a specific writer are compared using a similarity
measure and distribution over distances between features of samples is obtained. This
distribution represents the distribution of similarity measure for genuine samples of a
specific writer. When a signature is presented for test the similarity measure is
calculated by comparing the test signature with every genuine signature in the
database of the specific writer and a distribution of distance between features of this
questioned signature and genuine signatures is obtained. Now once the two
distributions namely within writer distribution and the questioned vs genuine
distribution are obtained, the next task is to obtain the probability of similarity
between these two distributions and thus infer whether the questioned signature is fake
or genuine. There are various methods to compare the two distributions such as
13

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Kullback-Leibler divergence, Jensen-Shannon test and

Bayesian Approach. Among these approaches the Bayesian Approach is best [12].
Mathematically the task of finding the probability that two distributions are similar
can be stated as follows.
Let F be a set of probability distributions. D1 is the probability distribution of
similarity between features of two genuine signatures and D2 is the probability
distribution of the similarity between the features of the questioned signature and the
genuine signatures. S1 is the multiset of n random samples generated from D1 and S2
is the multiset of m random samples generated from D2. Now we have to find the
probability that D1=D2 given S1 and S2, i.e.

PF=P (D1=D2 | S1, S2)

As shown in [12] using Bayesian inference method the above probability is can be
written as

Where Q(S) stands for marginalized joint probability of the multiset S under the
family F.

5.3 Hidden Markov Model approach

Because the signatures of the same person vary in height and width signal warping
techniques are commonly used in matching signatures. Due to the warping problem in
signature verification the use of HMM is becoming popular. HMMs are very popular
tool used for modelling time varying dynamic patterns like speech [13].
HMMs are an extension of the concept of Markov model to include the case where the
observation is a probabilistic function of the state i.e., the resulting model (which is
called a hidden Markov model) is a doubly embedded stochastic process with an
underlying stochastic process that is not observable (it is hidden), but can only be
observed through another set of stochastic processes that produce the sequence of
observations.

14

An HMM is characterized as follows:

i.

ii.

iii.

N, the number of states in the model. The states are hidden but still in many
practical applications there is some significance attached with the states. States
are interconnected to one another. The individual states are denoted as S = {S1,
S2,.,SN}.
M, the number of observable outcomes possible per state. The set observable
outcomes form an alphabet. These observable outcomes correspond to the
physical output of the system being modelled. The outcomes are denoted as V
= {v1, v2,.,vM}.
A={aij}, the state transition probabilities where
aij = P (qt+1 = Sj | qt = Sj),

iv.

1 i, j N

B={bj(k)}, the observation symbol probability distribution in state j where

bj(k) = P(vk at t| qt = Sj), 1 j N, 1 k M

v.

={j}, the initial state distribution where

j = P (q1 = Sj), 1 i N

For the HMM model to be useful in real life applications there are three problems that
have to be solved [16].
Problem 1: Given the output sequence O = O1O2..OT, and a HMM model = (A, B,
), we have to efficiently compute P (O| ), the probability of observing the sequence
O, given the model .
Problem 2: Given the observation sequence O = O1O2..OT and a HMM model , we
have to find a corresponding state sequence Q = q1q2.qT which is most probable.
Problem 3: How to find a HMM model that maximizes P (O| ).
Problem 1 is solved using forward backward algorithm which uses recursion to
calculate P (O| ) for partial sequences starting with sequence of length one up to
length T. Problem 2 is solved using Viterbi algorithm using dynamic programming.
Problem 3 is solved iteratively using Baum Welch algorithm. All these algorithms are
described in [14].

15

5.4 Dynamic Time Warping approach

The feature vectors obtained from two signatures cannot be compared directly as they
may be of different lengths. A technique called dynamic time warping (DTW) is used
to deal with this problem. Dynamic time warping algorithm is based on dynamic
programming and finds an optimal match between two sequences by stretching or
compressing two sequences.
In this approach for the signature verification problem first the 1-D vertical projection
is extracted from the signature. The 1-D vertical projection serves as the feature vector
for signature. Then this extracted vertical projection is matched with the vertical
projection of the template signature by computing a measure of dissimilarity between
the two projections. A non-linear matching is used due to the reasons mentioned
earlier.
The non-linear matching between the two templates is done on a rectangular grid as
shown in figure 4. The two templates are aligned along the x-axis and the y-axis,
respectively as shown in figure 4. The intersections on the grid are defined as nodes.
Each node (i, j) represents a match of the ith component of the vertical projection
extracted from the probe signature with the jth component of the vertical projection
extracted from the reference signature. There is a cost matrix which stores the the cost
associated with each node (i, j). Cost is a measure of dissimilarity between the ith and
jth components of probe and reference signature vertical projections respectively (if
the two components are highly dissimilar then the cost will be high).
The cost at dummy node (0, 0) is defined as zero. All paths start from this dummy
node. Now the goal is to find a path such that that sum of cost associated with the all
the nodes that the path passes through is minimum. To solve this problem dynamic
programming is used. In dynamic programming we incrementally find the path of
minimum cost. We start with a path of single node starting at the dummy node. Then
in the next step we find paths of minimum cost ending at the neighbours of the
dummy node. Thus each time we increase the path with single node until we reach the
final point on the grid.

16

Figure 4: The warping grid with the reference template and the probe template aligned along the
y-axis and x-axis, respectively. The least cost path has been plotted. The signatures from which
feature templates have been extracted are also shown [15].

5.5 Graph Matching based approach

This method depends only on the raw binary pixel intensities. This methods
considers signature verification problem as a graph matching problem. This method
is invariant to rotation, translation and scaling.
In the pre-processing steps of this method the binary image of signature is captured.
Then, pepper noise is removed. The angle of least second moment of signature is
found and the signature is rotated by this angle. The image is then smoothed and
thinned. The thinned image is then normalized that preserves the aspect ratio of the
signature. Now the thinned-normalized image is ready to be matched.
S1 and S2 are two offline signature images to be compared. Let X and Y are the sets
of vertices (pixels) that represent S1 and S2, respectively after thinning and
normalization. In this approach we construct a complete bipartite graph G = (V, E) =
Km,n , from X and Y where V = X Y , |X| = m, and |Y | = n. Since each vertex in X
can be connected to any of the vertex in Y graph G is complete and assuming that the
signatures are ordered such that |X| |Y | a complete matching of X into Y exists.
There are many possible complete matchings. The goal is to find the minimum cost
complete matching of X into Y. This is some form of the well-known Assignment
17

Problem (AP) from graph theory. The Hungarian Method is used to solve this
assignment problem; i.e., find how much the signatures S1 and S2 match [16].
In Hungarian method to solve the assignment problem a m x n cost matrix is found.
The rows correspond to the vertices of X and column corresponds to the vertices of
Y. Every vertex in X and Y has its corresponding coordinates x and y in the signature
image. These coordinates are used to calculate the entry (which is equal to the
Euclidean distance) in cost matrix corresponding to these vertices. After calculating
all entries of cost matrix, the assignment problem is solved. The cost of the resultant
solution equals the sum of all entries that correspond to the minimum cost solution.

5.6 Fusion of Multiple Classifiers

In this approach a weighted combination of multiple classifiers is used for offline
signature verification. Initially, various features are extracted from signature image.
These features are passed through multiple classifiers and the result of these
classifiers is finally fused to obtain the final result.
Assume that there are R classifiers each representing the given signature pattern by
a distinct feature vector xi. In the feature space each class wk is modelled by the
probability density function p (xi | wk) and its a priori probability density is denoted P
(wk).
Now, according to the Bayesian theory, given feature vectors xi, i=1,.....,R, and their
pattern Z, should be assigned to class wj that has maximum a posterior probability P
(wj | x1,x2,...xR) [17].
Ensembles of classifiers (EoCs) have been used to reduce error rates of many
challenging pattern recognition problems including signature verification. The main
idea behind using EoCs is that different classifiers usually make different errors on
different samples and thus using a well-chosen ensemble of classifiers reduces the
probability of error.
Given a pool of classifiers, an important issue is the selection of a diversified subset
of classifiers to form an EoC, such that the recognition rates are maximized during
operations. This task may be performed either statically or dynamically. Given a set
of reference samples (generally not used to train the classifiers), a static selection
approach selects the EoC that provides the best classification rates on that set. Then,
this EoC is used during operations to classify any input sample. Dynamic selection
also needs a reference set to select the best EoC; however, this task is performed online, by taking into account the specific characteristics of a given sample to be
classified [18].
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6. Conclusion
This report presents the basic idea of a Biometric system and discusses in some detail
the idea of a verification system using handwritten signature as a biometric trait. A
brief description of some of the employed approaches for offline signature verification
problem is given and their major merits and demerits are also listed. It is obvious that
the problem of signature verification becomes more difficult when passing from
random to skilled forgeries, the latter being so difficult a task that even human beings
make errors in several cases. The task is even more difficult for offline signature
verification due to absence of all the dynamic information. Concluding the discussion
it may be said that although much work has been done in the area of online signature
verification but the area of offline signature verification is far from maturity and much
work is needed in the same before it can be employed for some commercial purpose
like a automatic cheque verification system in a bank.

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