A systematic comparison between on-line and o -line methods for signature veri cation with hidden Markov models

This paper presents an extensive investigation of various HMM-based techniques for signature verification. Different feature extraction methods and HMM topologies are compared in order to obtain an optimized high performance signature verification system. Furthermore, this paper may be the first systematic comparison of on-line and off-line methods for signature verification using exactly the same database, and leading to the surprising result that the difference in performance for both approaches is relatively small. 1