Graphical Computing Problem: Signature Comparisons

As part of a college project, I'd like to deploy a system that compares signatures to check their similarities/validity.

Questions:

a)What algorithms are used on this branch of graphical com开发者_运维知识库puting (image comparison)?

b)Are there any open-source projects from which I could learn/participate?

c)Is there any commercial software available for signature comparisons?

a) There are many ways to go about signature comparison, including functional comparisons (mathematically defining signature curves and comparing them), compression (how close or spread out letters are), character-level (building a glyph by glyph database for a person and comparing), image-direct (literally direct image-to-reference comparison), and others. In addition, many systems integrate with signing pads to evaluate pressure at different points along the signature.

b) I haven't done the research.

c) I've used quite a few different ones, one prominent vendor is Topaz Systems.