A Comparative Study of Transfer Learning Models for Offline Signature Verification and Forgery Detection

Recognising one’s identity to enter a system is called authentication. This process can take various forms where users input the system with a set of identifying credentials to access the system. Signatures belong to behavioural biometric, where the distinct features of every individual are considered in order to corroborate the person’s identity. The act of falsely imitating one’s signature biometric to impersonate and leverage access to their asset is called signature forgery. Our paper presents a comparative study of various deep learning models using Siamese architecture, over a wide catalogue of signature images. Openly available datasets like CEDAR, Handwritten Signatures dataset from Kaggle, ICDAR 2011 SigComp, and BH-Sig260 signature corpus are used to train the models. A set of classifiers – Support Vector Classifiers (SVC), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), Logistic Regression (LR) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN) are applied sequentially to classify the signature as genuine or forged.