Performance Analysis of the Gradient Feature and the Modified Direction Feature for Off-line Signature Verification

Abstract

Feature extraction is an important process in off-line signature verification. In this work, the performance of two feature extraction techniques, the Modified Direction Feature (MDF) and the gradient feature are compared on the basis of similar experimental settings. In addition, the performance of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and the squared Mahalanobis distance classifier employing the Gradient Feature are also compared and reported. Without using forgeries for training, experimental results indicated that an average error rate as low as 15.03% could be obtained using the gradient feature and SVMs.