ICDAR 2013 Competitions on Signature Verification and Writer Identification for On- and Offline Skilled Forgeries (SigWiComp 2013)

This paper presents the results of the ICDAR2013 competitions on signature verification and writer identification for on- and offline skilled forgeries jointly organized by PR researchers and Forensic Handwriting Examiners (FHEs). The aim is to bridge the gap between recent technological developments and forensic casework. Two modalities (signatures, and handwritten text) are considered where training and evaluation data (in Dutch and Japanese) were collected and provided by FHEs and PR-researchers. Four tasks were defined where the systems had to perform Dutch offline signature verification, Japanese offline signature verification, Japanese online signature verification, and Dutch writer identification. The participants of the signatures modality were motivated to report their results in Likelihood Ratios (LR). This has made the systems even more interesting for application in forensic casework. For evaluation of signatures modality, we used both the traditional Equal Error Rate (EER) and forensically substantial Cost of Log Likelihood Ratios (Ĉ_llr). The system having the smallest value of the Minimum Cost of Log Likelihood Ratio (Ĉ_llr^min) is declared winner. For evaluation of the handwritten text modality, we used the precision and accuracy measures and winners are announced on the basis of best F-measure value.