The purpose of this study was to determine whether it was possible to compare your signature captured upon swiping a credit card to a stored signature on the card itself.

1. FRONT-END SIGNATURE COMPARISON ON A CREDIT CARD
The purpose of this study was to determine whether it was possible to compare your signature captured upon swiping a credit card to a stored signature on the
card itself.
Nathan Record, Matthew Richardson, Jarad Shannon, Kevin O'Connor, Dr. Stephen Elliott
OVERVIEW
INITIAL IDEA EXPERIMENT DESIGN
Credit card fraud is an area where literally tens of billions of dollars
each year are lost. While a lot of this fraud occurs online, a significant
portion also occurs in brick and mortar sites. The method that we
designed could be used to help create a first line of deterrence for
signature fraud, by catching fraudulent signatures before the
transaction would even be posted. Magnetic strip cards have tracks
and the third track is not used for card data. Our goal was to develop
an application which would allow the storage of a baseline signature
template onto the third track of a card, and could compare a live
signature at the point of sale to provide preliminary identity
verification.
• Capture signature.
• Create signature string.
• Verify signature string can fit onto magnetic stripe card.
• Capture secondary signature.
• Compare signatures using Levenshtein distance.
• Display confidence for comparison(Acts as a tolerance)
Note: The iPad was used as a signature capture medium for ease of writing a signature.
RESULTS
FUTURE WORK
There are several opportunities for future work on this project. Using a different signature comparison
algorithm could prove useful. Including data about the time it took to sign, as well as the overall
signature size would also be an improvement.
CONCLUSION
The comparison of two signatures was possible in a fast, efficient
manner and was capable of being stored on a magnetic stripe card.
We also found that a confidence interval of 75 and higher was a
strong rating. Anything below 70 is dissimilar and would be rejected.
Levenshtein Distance is the minimum number of single-character
edits required to turn one string into another.
Baseline
Comparison
Results
Good Result Bad Result
Data stored on card with
signature template on
Track 3.