In this paper, an efficient offline signature verification method based on an interval symbolic representation and a fuzzy similarity measure is proposed. In the feature extraction step, a set of local binary pattern-based features is computed from both the signature image and its under-sampled bitmap. Interval-valued symbolic data is then created for each feature in every signature class. As a result, a signature model composed of a set of interval values (corresponding to the number of features) is obtained for each individual's handwritten signature class. A novel fuzzy similarity measure is further proposed to compute the similarity between a test sample signature and the corresponding interval-valued symbolic model for the verification of the test sample. To evaluate the proposed verification approach, a benchmark offline English signature data set (GPDS-300) and a large data set (BHSig260) composed of Bangla and Hindi offline signatures were used. A comparison of our results with some recent signature verification methods available in the literature was provided in terms of average error rate and we noted that the proposed method always outperforms when the number of training samples is eight or more.

In this paper, a signature verification method based on texture features involving off-line signatures written in two different Indian scripts is proposed. Both Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Uniform Local Binary Patterns (ULBP), as powerful texture feature extraction techniques, are used for characterizing off-line signatures. The Nearest Neighbour (NN) technique is considered as the similarity metric for signature verification in the proposed method. To evaluate the proposed verification approach, a large Bangla and Hindi off-line signature dataset (BHSig260) comprising 6240 (260×24) genuine signatures and 7800 (260×30) skilled forgeries was introduced and further used for experimentation. We further used the GPDS-100 signature dataset for a comparison. The experiments were conducted, and the verification accuracies were separately computed for the LBP and ULBP texture features. There were no remarkable changes in the results obtained applying the LBP and ULBP features for verification when the BHSig260 and GPDS-100 signature datasets were used for experimentation.

This paper presents a study of line-wise text identification in comic books. Due to the unavailability of a single OCR system which can handle comic text of multiple scripts, the comic text identification based on script becomes an essential step for choosing the appropriate OCR. In this investigation, a new attempt has been made to explore a comic text identification technique of speech balloon to feed the identified text into the appropriate OCR. Latin and Bengali comic text lines have been considered for identification in this study. Two different local features, namely, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Multi-scale Block Local Binary Pattern (MBLBP) were considered in Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) domain in the current study. The support vector machine (SVM)-based classification technique has been considered for line-wise text identification. To evaluate the identification system, text datasets of Latin and Bengali comics have been newly prepared from Latin comic e-books and Bengali comic books respectively. The Latin comic e-books are collected from internet on website dedicated to Comics. To conduct the experiment, samples of 1938 text lines from each comic text dataset have been used. A publicly available eBDtheque comic text database has also been considered for performance comparison of the proposed method. 1938 number of text line images from eBDtheque comic text database has also taken into account in this approach. The highest identification accuracies of 98.30% and 98.29% on an average are achieved in the experiment when Bengali and eBDtheque comic text dataset are considered.

The objective of this investigation is to present an interval-symbolic representation based method for offline signature verification. In the feature extraction stage, Connected Components (CC), Enclosed Regions (ER), Basic Features (BF) and Curvelet Feature (CF)-based approaches are used to characterize signatures. Considering the extracted feature vectors, an interval data value is created for each feature extracted from every individual's signatures as an interval-valued symbolic data. This process results in a signature model for each individual that consists of a set of interval values. A similarity measure is proposed as the classifier in this paper. The interval-valued symbolic representation based method has never been used for signature verification considering Indian script signatures. Therefore, to evaluate the proposed method, a Hindi signature database consisting of 2400 (100×24) genuine signatures and 3000 (100×30) skilled forgeries is employed for experimentation. Concerning this large Hindi signature dataset, the highest verification accuracy of 91.83% was obtained on a joint feature set considering all four sets of features, while 2.5%, 13.84% and 8.17% of FAR (False Acceptance Rate), FRR (False Rejection Rate), and AER (Average Error Rate) were achieved, respectively.

Among all of the biometric authentication systems, handwritten signatures are considered as the most legally and socially accepted attributes for personal verification. The objective of this paper is to present an empirical contribution towards the understanding of a threshold-based signature verification technique involving off-line Bangla (Bengali) signatures. Experiments on signature verification involving non-English signatures are an important consideration in the signature verification area. Only very few research works employing signatures of Indian script have been considered in the field of non-English signature verification. To fill this gap, a threshold-based scheme for verification considering off-line Bangla signatures is proposed. Some techniques such as under-sampled bitmap, intersection/endpoint and directional chain code are employed for feature extraction. The Nearest Neighbour method is considered for classification. Furthermore, a Bangla signature database, which consists of 2400 (100×24) genuine signatures and 3000 (100×30) forgeries has been created and is employed for experimentation. We obtained a 15.57% Average Error Rate (AER) as the best verification result using directional chain code features employed in this research work.

Among all of the biometric authentication systems, handwritten signatures are considered as the most legally and socially accepted attributes for personal verification. The objective of this paper is to present an empirical contribution toward the understanding of a threshold-based signature verification technique involving off-line Bangla (Bengali) signatures. Experiments on signature verification concerning non-English signatures are an important consideration in the signature verification area. Only very few research works employing signatures of Indian script have been considered in the field of non-English based signature verification. To fill this gap, a threshold-based scheme for the verification of off-line Bangla signatures is proposed. Some techniques such as under-sampled bitmap, intersection/end point and directional chain code are employed for feature extraction. The thresholds are computed based on the similarity measures obtained employing the nearest neighbor classifier. The SVM classifier has also been considered for mainly comparative experimental result generation. Furthermore, a Bangla signature database, which consists of 2400 (100 × 24) genuine signatures and 3000 (100 × 30) forgeries, has been created and is employed for experimentation. An average error rate (AER) of 12.33% was obtained as the best verification result using directional chain code features in this research work. As a comparative study, a different dataset (GPDS-160) has also been considered.

In the field of information security, biometric systems play an important role. Within biometrics, automatic signature identification and verification has been a strong research area because of the social and legal acceptance and extensive use of the written signature as an individual authentication. Signature verification is a process in which the questioned signature is examined in detail in order to determine whether it belongs to the claimed person or not. Despite substantial research in the field of signature verification involving Western signatures, very few works have been dedicated to non-Western signatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Persian etc. In this paper, the performance of an off-line signature verification system involving Bangla signatures, whose style is distinct from Western scripts, was investigated. The Gaussian Grid feature extraction technique was employed for feature extraction and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were considered for classification. The Bangla signature database employed in the experiments consisted of 3000 forgeries and 2400 genuine signatures. An encouraging accuracy of 90.4% was obtained from the experiments.

In this paper, we present an empirical contribution towards the understanding of multi-script signature identification. In the proposed signature identification system, the signatures of Bengali (Bangla), Hindi (Devanagari) and English are considered for the identification process. This system will identify whether a claimed signature belongs to the group of Bengali, Hindi or English signatures. Zernike Moment and histogram of gradient are employed as two different feature extraction techniques. In the proposed system, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are considered as classifiers for signature identification. A database of 2100 Bangla signatures, 2100 Hindi signatures and 2100 English signatures are used for experimentation. Two different results based on two different feature sets are calculated and analysed. The highest accuracy of 92.14% is obtained based on the gradient features using 4200 (1400 Bangla +1400 Hindi + 1400 English) samples for training and 2100 (700 Bangla +700 Hindi +700 English) samples for testing.

Handwritten Signatures are one of the widely used biometrics for document authentication as well as human authorization. The purpose of this paper is to present an offline signature verification system involving Hindi signatures. Signature verification is a process by which the questioned signature is examined in detail in order to determine whether it belongs to the claimed person or not. Despite of substantial research in the field of signature verification involving Western signatures, very little attention has been dedicated to non-Western signatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian etc. In this paper, the performance of an off-line signature verification system involving Hindi signatures, whose style is distinct from Western scripts, has been investigated. The gradient and Zernike moment features were employed and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were considered for verification. To the best of the authors' knowledge, Hindi signatures have never been used for the task of signature verification and this is the first report of using Hindi signatures in this area. The Hindi signature database employed for experimentation consisted of 840 (35x24) genuine signatures and 1050 (35x30) forgeries. An encouraging accuracy of 7.42% FRR and 4.28% FAR were obtained following experimentation when the gradient features were employed.

In the field of information security, the usage of biometrics is growing for user authentication. Automatic signature recognition and verification is one of the biometric techniques, which is only one of several used to verify the identity of individuals. In this paper, a foreground and background based technique is proposed for identification of scripts from bi-lingual (English/Roman and Chinese) off-line signatures. This system will identify whether a claimed signature belongs to the group of English signatures or Chinese signatures. The identification of signatures based on its script is a major contribution for multi-script signature verification. Two background information extraction techniques are used to produce the background components of the signature images. Gradient-based method was used to extract the features of the foreground as well as background components. Zernike Moment feature was also employed on signature samples. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used as the classifier for signature identification in the proposed system. A database of 1120 (640 English+480 Chinese) signature samples were used for training and 560 (320 English+240 Chinese) signature samples were used for testing the proposed system. An encouraging identification accuracy of 97.70% was obtained using gradient feature from the experiment.

In the field of biometric authentication, automatic signature identification and verification has been a strong research area because of the social and legal acceptance and extensive use of the written signature as an easy method for authentication. Signature verification is a process in which the questioned signature is examined in detail in order to determine whether it belongs to the claimed person or not. Signatures provide a secure means for confirmation and authorization in legal documents. So nowadays, signature identification and verification becomes an essential component in automating the rapid processing of documents containing embedded signatures. Sometimes, part-based signature verification can be useful when a questioned signature has lost its original shape due to inferior scanning quality. In order to address the above-mentioned adverse scenario, we propose a new feature encoding technique. This feature encoding is based on the amalgamation of Gabor filter-based features with SURF features (G-SURF). Features generated from a signature are applied to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. For experimentation, 1500 (50×30) forgeries and 1200 (50×24) genuine signatures from the GPDS signature database were used. A verification accuracy of 97.05% was obtained from the experiments.

In the current scenario retrieving information from document images is a challenging problem. In this paper we propose a shape code based word-image matching (word-spotting) technique for retrieval of multilingual documents written in Indian languages. Here, each query word image to be searched is represented by a primitive shape code using (i) zonal information of extreme points (ii) vertical shape based feature (iii) crossing count (with respect to vertical bar position) (iv) loop shape and position (v) background information etc. Each candidate word (a word having similar aspect ratio and topological feature to the query word) of the document is also coded accordingly. Then, an inexact string matching technique is used to measure the similarity between the primitive codes generated from the query word image and each candidate word of the document with which the query image is to be searched. Based on the similarity score, we retrieve the document where the query image is found. Experimental results on Bangla, Devnagari and Gurumukhi scripts document image databases confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed approach.

A two-stage approach for word-wise identification of English (Roman), Devnagari and Bengali (Bangla) scripts is proposed. This approach balances the tradeoff between recognition accuracy and processing speed. The 1st stage allows identifying scripts with high speed, yet less accuracy when dealing with noisy data. The advanced 2nd stage processes only those samples that yield low recognition confidence in the first stage. For both stages a rough character segmentation is performed and features are computed on segmented character components. Features used in the 1st stage are a 64-dimensional chain-code-histogram feature, while 400-dimensional gradient features are used in the 2nd stage. Final classification of a word to a particular script is done via majority voting of each recognized character component of the word. Extensive experiments with various confidence scores were conducted and reported here. The overall recognition accuracy and speed is remarkable. Correct classification of 98.51% on 11,123 test words is achieved, even when the recognition-confidence is as high as 95% at both stages.

There are many documents in Srilanka where a single document page may contain Sinhala, Tamil and English texts. For OCR development of such a document page, it is better to identify different scripts present in the page and then feed the identified portion to the respective OCR module. In this paper, a SVM based technique is proposed for word-wise identification of Sinhala, Tamil and English scripts from a single document page. Structural features, topological features and water reservoir principle based features are mainly used here for the purpose. From the experiment we obtained encouraging results.