Offline Handwritten Signature Verification - Literature Review

The area of Handwritten Signature Verification has been broadly researched in the last decades, but remains an open research problem. The objective of signature verification systems is to discriminate if a given signature is genuine (produced by the claimed individual), or a forgery (produced by an impostor). This has demonstrated to be a challenging task, in particular in the offline (static) scenario, that uses images of scanned signatures, where the dynamic information about the signing process is not available. Many advancements have been proposed in the literature in the last 5-10 years, most notably the application of Deep Learning methods to learn feature representations from signature images. In this paper, we present how the problem has been handled in the past few decades, analyze the recent advancements in the field, and the potential directions for future research.Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA 2017

A Traveling Standard for the Calibration of Data Acquisition Boards

The large use of measurement systems based on data acquisition boards makes the traceability-chain assurance a tricky problem due to the difficulty in consistently calibrating such boards. In this paper, the authors describe a traveling standard which can be used for the calibration of many commercially available acquisition boards. By employing such a traveling standard, the calibration procedure can be remotely exercised by a calibration laboratory through the personal computer which hosts the board that has to be calibrated. In such a way, the calibration results refer to environmental, software, and hardware conditions that exactly match the board-operating conditions. Furthermore, the board unavailability time is drastically reduced, with a consequent economic advantage for the board owner. The traveling standard is based on a microcontroller which is responsible for the communication with the PC that hosts the board and for the board-stimulus generation, and on a digital multimeter, which acts as a reference standard