FC-ResNet: A Multilingual Handwritten Signature Verification Model Using an Improved ResNet with CBAM

Offline signature verification is a widely used biometric method in finance, law, and administrative procedures. However, existing deep convolutional neural network models perform poorly on signature datasets that span different regions and ethnic people, while also suffering from problems such as large parameter counts and slow inference speeds. To address these issues, we propose an improved residual network model (FC-ResNet). This model introduces a convolutional block attention module into the classical residual network to adapt to the diversity and variability of signatures, while also compressing the model for lightweight deployment. Due to the lack of public, offline handwritten signature datasets for ethnic people, we collected a large-scale offline handwritten signature dataset, including genuine signatures and forged signatures in Chinese, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kirgiz, totaling 38,400 images. Our FC-ResNet model achieved an accuracy of over 96% for each language in our self-built dataset, as well as accuracy rates of 96.21%, 98.42%, and 97.28% on the public datasets CEDAR, BHSig-B, and BHSig-H, respectively. Based on the above experimental results, our proposed model demonstrates great potential for both public and self-built signature datasets, while also exhibiting significant advantages in lightweight model deployment. We believe that this work can provide a feasible solution for ethnic people signature verification.