SignatureGuard: hybrid CNN–transformer model for signature verification and identification across Arabic and English datasets
摘要
Offline signature verification has a persistent Latin-script bias: most systems are built and evaluated on English datasets, while Arabic and other non-Latin scripts are largely absent from the benchmarking literature. SignatureGuard is a three-task framework that evaluates six hybrid CNN–transformer architectures on two offline signature benchmarks (one Arabic, ASVAR; one English, CEDAR) under a single shared preprocessing and training pipeline, enabling direct architectural comparison across writing systems. The three tasks are binary forgery detection, multi-class biometric identification, and forgery source identification. To address the Arabic data gap, we publicly released ASVAR: 3471 images (1712 genuine, 1759 forged) from 70 individuals. Hybrid pairings of EfficientNetB7 or ResNet50 with the Vision Transformer (ViT-B/16) achieve test accuracies of 98.2% and 98.4% on forgery detection, macro-F1 above 0.97, and Cohen’s