Target dependent score normalization techniques and their application to signature verification

Score normalization methods in biometric verification, which encompass the more traditional user-dependent decision thresholding techniques, are reviewed from a test hypotheses point of view. These are classified into test dependent and target dependent methods. The focus of the paper is on target dependent score normalization techniques, which are further classified into impostor-centric, target-centric, and target-impostor methods. These are applied to an on-line signature verification system on signature data from the First International Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2004). In particular, a target-centric technique based on the cross-validation procedure provides the best relative performance improvement testing both with skilled (19%) and random forgeries (53%) as compared to the raw verification performance without score normalization (7.14% and 1.06% Equal Error Rate for skilled and random forgeries, respectively).