Biometrics is constantly evolving technology which has been widely used in many official and commercial identification applications. In fact in recent years biometric-based authentication techniques received more attention due to increased concerns in security. Most biometric systems that are currently in use typically employ a single biometric trait. Such systems are called unibiometric systems. Despite considerable advances in recent years, there are still challenges in authentication based on a single biometric trait, such as noisy data, restricted degree of freedom, intra-class variability, non-universality, spoof attack and unacceptable error rates. Some of the challenges can be handled by designing a multimodal biometric system. Multimodal biometric systems are those which utilize or are capable of utilizing, more than one physiological or behavioural characteristic for enrolment, verification, or identification. In this thesis, we propose a novel fusion approach at a hybrid level between iris and online signature traits. Online signature and iris authentication techniques have been employed in a range of biometric applications. Besides improving the accuracy, the fusion of both of the biometrics has several advantages such as increasing population coverage, deterring spoofing activities and reducing enrolment failure. In this doctoral dissertation, we make a first attempt to combine online signature and iris biometrics. We principally explore the fusion of iris and online signature biometrics and their potential application as biometric identifiers. To address this issue, investigations is carried out into the relative performance of several statistical data fusion techniques for integrating the information in both unimodal and multimodal biometrics. We compare the results of the multimodal approach with the results of the individual online signature and iris authentication approaches. This dissertation describes research into the feature and decision fusion levels in multimodal biometrics.

No description available.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le contexte de la vérification d'identité par la signature manuscrite en-ligne. Notre travail concerne plus particulièrement la recherche de nouvelles mesures qui permettent de quantifier la qualité des signatures en-ligne et d'établir des critères automatiques de fiabilité des systèmes de vérification. Nous avons proposé trois mesures de qualité faisant intervenir le concept d’entropie. Nous avons proposé une mesure de qualité au niveau de chaque personne, appelée «Entropie personnelle», calculée sur un ensemble de signatures authentiques d’une personne. L’originalité de l’approche réside dans le fait que l’entropie de la signature est calculée en estimant les densités de probabilité localement, sur des portions, par le biais d’un Modèle de Markov Caché. Nous montrons que notre mesure englobe les critères habituels utilisés dans la littérature pour quantifier la qualité d’une signature, à savoir: la complexité, la variabilité et la lisibilité. Aussi, cette mesure permet de générer, par classification non supervisée, des catégories de personnes, à la fois en termes de variabilité de la signature et de complexité du tracé. En confrontant cette mesure aux performances de systèmes de vérification usuels sur chaque catégorie de personnes, nous avons trouvé que les performances se dégradent de manière significative (d’un facteur 2 au minimum) entre les personnes de la catégorie «haute Entropie» (signatures très variables et peu complexes) et celles de la catégorie «basse Entropie» (signatures les plus stables et les plus complexes). Nous avons ensuite proposé une mesure de qualité basée sur l’entropie relative (distance de Kullback-Leibler), dénommée «Entropie Relative Personnelle» permettant de quantifier la vulnérabilité d’une personne aux attaques (bonnes imitations). Il s’agit là d’un concept original, très peu étudié dans la littérature. La vulnérabilité associée à chaque personne est calculée comme étant la distance de Kullback-Leibler entre les distributions de probabilité locales estimées sur les signatures authentiques de la personne et celles estimées sur les imitations qui lui sont associées. Nous utilisons pour cela deux Modèles de Markov Cachés, l'un est appris sur les signatures authentiques de la personne et l'autre sur les imitations associées à cette personne. Plus la distance de Kullback-Leibler est faible, plus la personne est considérée comme vulnérable aux attaques. Cette mesure est plus appropriée à l’analyse des systèmes biométriques car elle englobe en plus des trois critères habituels de la littérature, la vulnérabilité aux imitations. Enfin, nous avons proposé une mesure de qualité pour les signatures imitées, ce qui est totalement nouveau dans la littérature. Cette mesure de qualité est une extension de l’Entropie Personnelle adaptée au contexte des imitations: nous avons exploité l’information statistique de la personne cible pour mesurer combien la signature imitée réalisée par un imposteur va coller à la fonction de densité de probabilité associée à la personne cible. Nous avons ainsi défini la mesure de qualité des imitations comme étant la dissimilarité existant entre l'entropie associée à la personne à imiter et celle associée à l'imitation. Elle permet lors de l’évaluation des systèmes de vérification de quantifier la qualité des imitations, et ainsi d’apporter une information vis-à-vis de la résistance des systèmes aux attaques. Nous avons aussi montré l’intérêt de notre mesure d’Entropie Personnelle pour améliorer les performances des systèmes de vérification dans des applications réelles. Nous avons montré que la mesure d’Entropie peut être utilisée pour : améliorer la procédure d’enregistrement, quantifier la dégradation de la qualité des signatures due au changement de plateforme, sélectionner les meilleures signatures de référence, identifier les signatures aberrantes, et quantifier la pertinence de certains paramètres pour diminuer la variabilité temporelle. / This thesis is focused on the quality assessment of online signatures and its application to online signature verification systems. Our work aims at introducing new quality measures quantifying the quality of online signatures and thus establishing automatic reliability criteria for verification systems. We proposed three quality measures involving the concept of entropy, widely used in Information Theory. We proposed a novel quality measure per person, called "Personal Entropy" calculated on a set of genuine signatures of such a person. The originality of the approach lies in the fact that the entropy of the genuine signature is computed locally, on portions of such a signature, based on local density estimation by a Hidden Markov Model. We show that our new measure includes the usual criteria of the literature, namely: signature complexity, signature variability and signature legibility. Moreover, this measure allows generating, by an unsupervised classification, 3 coherent writer categories in terms of signature variability and complexity. Confronting this measure to the performance of two widely used verification systems (HMM, DTW) on each Entropy-based category, we show that the performance degrade significantly (by a factor 2 at least) between persons of "high Entropy-based category", containing the most variable and the least complex signatures and those of "low Entropy-based category", containing the most stable and the most complex signatures. We then proposed a novel quality measure based on the concept of relative entropy (also called Kullback-Leibler distance), denoted « Personal Relative Entropy » for quantifying person's vulnerability to attacks (good forgeries). This is an original concept and few studies in the literature are dedicated to this issue. This new measure computes, for a given writer, the Kullback-Leibler distance between the local probability distributions of his/her genuine signatures and those of his/her skilled forgeries: the higher the distance, the better the writer is protected from attacks. We show that such a measure simultaneously incorporates in a single quantity the usual criteria proposed in the literature for writer categorization, namely signature complexity, signature variability, as our Personal Entropy, but also the vulnerability criterion to skilled forgeries. This measure is more appropriate to biometric systems, because it makes a good compromise between the resulting improvement of the FAR and the corresponding degradation of FRR. We also proposed a novel quality measure aiming at quantifying the quality of skilled forgeries, which is totally new in the literature. Such a measure is based on the extension of our former Personal Entropy measure to the framework of skilled forgeries: we exploit the statistical information of the target writer for measuring to what extent an impostor’s hand-draw sticks to the target probability density function. In this framework, the quality of a skilled forgery is quantified as the dissimilarity existing between the target writer’s own Personal Entropy and the entropy of the skilled forgery sample. Our experiments show that this measure allows an assessment of the quality of skilled forgeries of the main online signature databases available to the scientific community, and thus provides information about systems’ resistance to attacks. Finally, we also demonstrated the interest of using our Personal Entropy measure for improving performance of online signature verification systems in real applications. We show that Personal Entropy measure can be used to: improve the enrolment process, quantify the quality degradation of signatures due to the change of platforms, select the best reference signatures, identify the outlier signatures, and quantify the relevance of times functions parameters in the context of temporal variability.

Signatures have been used to authenticate documents and transactions for over 1500 years and are still being used today. In this project a method for verifying signatures written on a tablet has been developed and tested in order to test whether pressure information is vital for a well performing on-line signature verification systems. First a background study was conducted to learn about the state-of-the-art methods and what features several research systems used, then the method was developed. The method is a Dynamic Time Warp with 8 local features, 2 of them were pressure values or derived from pressure, and 1 global feature. The developed method was tested on SUSig visual corpus containing signatures from 94 persons. The Equal Error Rate (EER) when not using pressure was 5.39 % for random forgeries and 3.24 % for skilled forgeries. EER when using pressure was 5.19 % for random forgeries and 2.80 % for skilled forgeries. The background study concluded that pen inclination is not required for a well performing system. Considering the result of this project and the result of others, it seems that pressure information is not vital, but provide some valuable information that can be used to classify signatures more accurately. / Signaturer har blivit använda för att autentisera dokument och transaktioner i över 1500 år och används än idag. En metod för att testa signaturer skrivna på en digital platta har utvecklats för att testa huruvida tryckkänslighet och vinkeln på pennan är kritiskt för ett välpresterande on-line signature verification system. Först så genomfördes en bakgrundsstudie för att se hur andra moderna metoder gör och vad för features de använder för att sen utveckla metoden. Den använda metoden är en Dynamic Time Warp med 8 lokala features varav 2 är tyckkänslighet eller utvunna från tryckkänslighet samt en global feature. Metoden testades sedan på SUSig visual corpus som har signaturer från 94 personer. Equal Error Rate (EER) för de feature kombinationerna som inte använde tryckkänslighet blev 5.39 % för slumpmässiga signaturer och 3.24 % för förfalskningar. EER för kombinationer av features som innehåller tryckkänslighet blev 5.19 % för slumpmässiga signaturer och 2.80 % för förfalskningar. Givet resultatet av det här projektet samt andra projekt utforskade i bakgrundsstudien så verkar tryckkänslighet inte vara kritiskt men ger en del värdeful information för klassificera signaturer mer träffsäkert. Bakgrundsstudien gav att vinkeln på pennan inte var kritisk för att välpresterande system.

This paper concerns methods of verification of person's signature and handwriting. Some of commonly used techniques are resumed and described with related literature being referred. Next aim of this work is design and implementation of a simple handwriting verification application. Application is based on edge detection and comparison of a set of structural and statistical features. As a support classification tool a SVM classifier of the LIBSVM software is employed. The Application is written in C language using OpenCV graphics library. Testing and training set was extracted from samples found in the IAM Handwriting Database. Application was created and tested in the Windows XP operating system.