This increase in crime is driving a renewed interest in advanced security measures. For everyday activities such as conducting financial transactions, boarding an aircraft, entering a secure physical location, or crossing borders, institutions increasingly require reliable and inexpensive authentication and authorization.
Biometrics is a new technology that is quickly gaining traction for its promise of mitigating security breaches and providing solutions to key problems facing real businesses, such as financial theft and fraud. Biometrics are used to verify identity through physiological or behavioral characteristics that are unique to an individual and cannot be forgotten, lost, or stolen. It can take the form of several technologies, such as hand geometry, iris or retina scans, dynamic signature age verification, face and voice recognition, fingerprint recognition, and more.
Biometric handwriting characteristics are absolutely unique to each individual and virtually impossible to duplicate. So handwriting is still one of the most powerful means of human identification today. Dynamic signature verification scrutinizes a number of biometric characteristics of that signature and compares it to a reference signature kept on file to make a conclusion about measuring the authenticity of the signature. If multiple authentic reference signatures are available, use them to develop a measure of the stability of a particular feature and estimate the probability of an observed deviation from a suspect signature.
The most advanced signature verification systems use a combination of powerful engines that use different approaches to comprehensive signature verification. Each engine is accompanied by other innovative technologies that scrutinize the shape of the signature by analyzing biometric characteristics such as speed, acceleration, deceleration, stroke order and length, pen pressure, and timing information received directly during the signing. Finally, results obtained from different analysis methods are combined to provide a reliable measure of the likelihood of a match between the signature in question and the actual reference signature. The success of dynamic signature verification in these systems depends on analyzing the graphical representation of the signature and biometric characteristics received during the signing process. Using several independent analysis methods significantly improves performance and adds significant robustness to signature verification software.
Because biometric signature verification technology has various properties involved in analysis, it can ensure high verification efficiency even if it does not track specific characteristics (eg pressure) of the signature. This important aspect of signature authentication reduces reliance on the type, nature, and quality of pen support or pointing devices. For example, the pressure characteristics are very important when obtaining signatures from pressure-sensitive devices, and less important when capturing from pointing devices built into many laptop computers that are not sensitive to applied pressure.
Advances in technology have improved the accuracy of biometric systems and made them more widely available as a viable verification method. Due to the reliability, convenience, and high level of security that biometrics provide, they are already widely used in many applications to give alternative technologies a competitive edge. At the same time, not all biometric methods are equally acceptable in all industries and in all applications. One of the biggest challenges with biometrics is privacy concerns due to their relatively intrusive nature. For example, it is for this reason that fingerprint recognition and iris scanning are not accepted in many retail, banking, and financial services applications. Dynamic signature verification is a much more digestible biometric identification method. The act of signing is socially accepted and routine in our legal and commercial lives. Therefore, individuals are less likely to object to signature verification compared to other possible biometric analyses. This allows dynamic signature verification to be seamlessly integrated into existing work processes.