Kruskal Wallis and mRMR Feature Selection based Online Signature Verification System using Multiple SVM and KNN

Signature verification is a very important research area. Signature has been widely accepted as a person authentication method for centuries. It is mostly used in financial transactions, document authentication and agreements. It is more susceptible to being forged than any other biometrics. Online signature verification is used in real-time applications like e-commerce, online resource access, online financial transactions, physical access into a restricted area and many more. In order to achieve high efficiency in online signature verification systems, feature extraction and feature selection play a significant role. A suitable signature verification system is needed to prevent forgery and accept the genuine signer. We have extracted 30 global features from all 40 signers for verification. Here, k fold cross-validation technique is used to enhance the model's performance on unseen data. User-specific feature selection and ranking are done using Kruskal Wallis and Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) algorithm to hunt which performs better in our case. Kruskal-Wallis method tests if two or more classes have an equal median and gives the value of P based on which discriminative features are selected, whereas the mRMR algorithm ranks the whole feature set according to its importance. It evaluates the relevance of a feature and penalizes redundancy. Finally, multiple SVM and KNN classifiers are trained and tested with various selected features using Kruskal Wallis and mRMR to determine which combination performs best for the online signature verification system. Our model is trained, validated and tested on the SVC 2004 Task 1 database, which consists of skill forgery signatures. Here, one to one verification is done using each user's genuine and skill forgery signatures, which is the hardest to detect. Best average testing accuracy achieved in our case is 90.25% using Weighted KNN and Kruskal Wallis selected 15 features.