Offline Signature Verification System Using SVM Classifier with Image Pre-processing Steps and SURF Algorithm

A signature is a mark or name that represents the identity of the people and the Signature Verification System (SVS) is used to validate the identity of people. The signature verification system is mostly used for bank cheques, vouchers, intelligence agencies and others. There are two types of SVS which are online and offline signature verification systems. The paper deals with an offline signature verification system. The proposed system consists of four main stages, (i) image acquisition, (ii) image pre-processing, (iii) feature extraction and (iv) classification. The image pre-processing steps involved binarization, noise removal using Gaussian filter and image resizing and thinning. In the feature extraction stage, Bag-of-Features with the Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) extractor was utilized. In the third stage, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used. Lastly, the confusion matrix and the verification rate were used to evaluate the performance of the classifier. In this paper, we implement and compare the performance of the signature verification system without entering the user ID and the signature verification system entering the user ID. For the ratio of 75% and 25% of the training and testing, respectively, the average accuracy for the signature verification system without entering the user ID is 71.36%, whereas the average accuracy for the signature verification system entering the user ID is 79.55%.