Identification by handwriting verification

Abstract

A person, who is to have his identity verified, first writes his signature or any other appropriate group of characters or symbols several times with a special pen which produces signals representative of the writing forces in the plane of the paper and the writing pressure. From these a number of different parameters are derived. These parameters may be, for example, average value, energy, timing, number of zero crossings, etc. Average values and standard deviations are obtained for each of these parameters and these are stored as components of a template vector. In order to detect whether or not a later handwriting sample is authentic, a measure of the difference between the template vector and the later handwriting sample vector is calculated. The distinction between true signatures and forgeries is then made on the basis of this difference. If it is less than an appropriately selected value the signature is judged authentic while if it is above such value it is judged a forgery. The measure of difference may be in terms of RMS difference, for example, or say, average difference. Or, a signature may be deemed a forgery if any one component of the later written signature vector, or some combination of components, deviates beyond some threshold value.