Online signature verification based on null component analysis and principal component analysis

This paper describes a method for stroke-based online signature verification using null component analysis (NCA) and principal component analysis (PCA). After the segmentation and flexible matching of the signature, we extract stable segments from each reference signature in order that the segment sequences have the same length. The reference set of feature vectors are transformed and separated into null components (NCs) and principal components (PCs) by K-L transform. Online signature verification is a special two-category classification problem and there is not a single available forgery set in an actual system. Therefore, it is different from the typical application of PCA in pattern recognition that both NCA and PCA are used to respectively analyze stable and unstable components of genuine reference set. Experiments on a data set containing a total 1,410 signatures of 94 signers show that the NCA/PCA-based online signature verification method can achieve better results. The best result yields an equal error rate of 1.9%.