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Sign Your Name Online With A Mouse
icke writes "Soon, the way you use your mouse could help prove who you are. According to a BBC News article, scientists have found a way for people to sign their name online using a mouse instead of a pen. The technology, based on the research from Queen Mary College, University of London by Peter McOwan, 'uses a neural network to pick out the unique features of the way that someone uses a mouse.'"
If you've ever tried drawing anything with a mouse, you probably agree that it's not easy .. I probably couldn't even write my name and have it be recognizable as being written by the same person, let alone be an exact digital match. Maybe I'm a spaz on the mouse, but I know for a fact I'm *much* better than the average Joe-Sixpack type I see at work. So I have a hard time believing this concept will work. Stylus tablets is another story, though.. If only everyone owned one of those! :-)
The problem is that the actual person may also have a really tough time reproducing the same speeds, patterns, etc. in their signature.
That is the entire point of a modal analysis of the signature. It captures not only the central tendency of the signature, but also the characteristic modes of variation. The idea is that everyone's signature varies in amounts and ways that are unique to that person. Some people might vary more on the first letter, the heights of letters, the shapes of loops, slant, the spacing where the hand scoots over, etc. Analyzing a population of samples from the person gives the system a good idea about what parts of the signature vary, how they vary, and how much they vary.
The reasons for this are especially apparent when you look at the handwriting of people like myself whose fine motor control (like many guys) is not so "fine"
Like you, I too was born without an analog plotter interface. A person like myself or jtheory will simply get logged by the system as being more variable than a person like Ms. Ima Caligrapher. If a forger or mouselogger tries to replicate our signature, they will be flagged as being too perfect.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I wrote the software for my company's delivery handhelds that captures the signature of the person accepting the merchandise. I came up with a fairly novel way of storing the data so that each sig only uses ~1K... which makes it easy to send over a CDPD wireless connection to my server. At this point I have about 33000 sigs in a database.
The thing is... I really doubt this would be useful for 'stealing' an identity. Sure, when you're talking about credit card sigs, it might be slightly different, but really...
The reason I think technology like this will never be implemented is that everyone, depending on their current state of mind, can sign at two separate times and look like two different people. Once someone is turned away at a sale because they were too sleepy or had a couple beers, the whole point of this would be useless.