Offline Handwritten Signature Identification and Verification Using Contourlet Transform. Paper presented at

In this paper, we are proposing a new method for offline (static) handwritten signature identification and verification based on Gabor wavelet transform. The whole idea is offering a simple and robust method for extracting features based on Gabor Wavelet which the dependency of the method to the nationality of signer has been reduced to its minimal. After pre-processing stage, that contains noise reduction and signature image normalisation by size and rotation, a virtual grid is placed on the signature image. Gabor wavelet coefficients with different frequencies and directions are computed on each points of this grid and then fed into a classifier. The shortest weighted distance has been used as the classifier. The weight that is used as the coefficient for computing the shortest distance is based on the distribution of instances in each of signature classes. As it was pointed out earlier, one of the advantages of this system is its capability of signature identification and verification of different nationalities; thus it has been tested on four signature dataset with different nationalities including Iranian, Turkish, South African and Spanish signatures. Experimental results and the comparison of the proposed system with other system