Non-English and Non-Latin Signature Verification Systems: A Survey

Abstract

Signatures continue to be an important biometric because they remain widely used as a means of personal verification and therefore an automatic verification system is needed. Manual signature-based authentication of a large number of documents is a difficult and time consuming task. Consequently for many years, in the field of protected communication and financial applications, we have observed an explosive growth in biometric personal authentication systems that are closely connected with measurable unique physical characteristics (e.g. hand geometry, iris scan, finger prints or DNA) or behavioural features. Substantial research has been undertaken in the field of signature verification involving English signatures, but to the best of our knowledge, very few works have considered non-English signatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc. In order to convey the state-of-the-art in the field to researchers, in this paper we present a survey of non-English and non-Latin signature verification systems.