Area bound dynamic time warping based fast and accurate person authentication using a biometric pen

The paper presents a modified dynamic time warping (DTW) technique for person authentication based on time series matching obtained from handwriting. The online data has been acquired by a biometric smart pen device. The proposed method allows fast and accurate classification of human individuals based on handwritten PIN words or signature samples. Although classic DTW provides robust distance measurements essential for accurate classification of sequences, it is computationally expensive. To speed up computations we introduce area bound dynamic time warping (AB_DTW) that divides time series into several areas bounded by segments of consecutive zero crossings including local peaks and valleys. Unlike classic DTW which compares whole signals, the proposed AB_DTW warps areas bounded by the local regions. Two kinds of data abstraction formats of area bound-1 dimensional and 2 dimensional-are evaluated. Experimental results show that because of a higher-level data abstraction, the proposed approach is several times faster than classic DTW. Moreover, AB_DTW does not offer substantial loss of accuracy which is required for authentication performance using handwritten PIN words and signatures sampled by biometric pen device. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.