Automatic Signature-Based Writer Identification in Mixed-Script Scenarios

Automated approach for human identification based on biometric traits has become popular research topic among the scientists since last few decades. Among the several biometric modalities, handwritten signature is one of the very common and most prevalent approaches. In the past, researchers have proposed different handcrafted feature-based techniques for automatic writer identification from offline signatures. Currently huge interests towards deep learning-based solutions for several real-life pattern recognition problems have been found which revealed promising results. In this paper, we propose a light-weight CNN architecture to identify writers from offline signatures written by two popular scripts namely Devanagari and Roman. Experiments were conducted using two different frameworks which are as follows: (i) In first case, signature script separation has been carried out followed by script-wise writer identification, (ii) Secondly, signature of two scripts was mixed together with various ratios and writer identification has been performed in a script independent manner. Outcome of both the frameworks have been analyzed to get the comparative idea. Furthermore, comparative analysis was done with recognized CNN architectures as well as handcrafted feature-based approaches and the proposed method shows better outcome. The dataset used in this paper can be freely downloaded from the link: https://ieee-dataport.org/open-access/multi-script-handwritten-signature-roman-deyanagari for research purpose.