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Im working on a project where I hope to use an android mobile device to query a database and retrieve information. Part of the project involves the user to sign the phone with their signature so that it is sent back to the database. By signing I mean a manual signature using pen input on the screen. Is this possible? Does anyone know of any android phones out there (preferably Samsung) that does this? Thanks

DMC
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  • It has capacitive screen, so most pens won't work anyway. But there are 'special' pens that will work. – Bojan Kogoj Dec 09 '11 at 09:40
  • Signature comparison should be done using vector comparison rather than comparing painted bitmaps; People generally don't get their signatures exactly the same every time so a vector-based algorithm could allow variance within given parameters at each change of direction. Measurement of speed could also be desirable to avoid fraudsters carefully imitating a signature. – Emyr Dec 09 '11 at 09:52

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In short, no. Signature recognition is an incredibly advanced topic and there are no built-in apps / libraries you can leverage. It takes expert humans to recognize signatures and they still generally can't give certainties. There are ways you can detect pattern and image similarity in Java but there is going to be some fuzzing involved and it will likely not be as accurate as you desire

Update

If you are simply looking to record the signature you can capture touch events via View.onTouchEvent(). You can see an example of using this to in the Touch Paint API Demo. In addition to drawing the coordinates on the screen you can record them to a database to be re-assembled later.

Jim Mitchener
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  • Hi thanks for the reply. Im not looking for my database to authenticate the signature. All I want is for my phone to record the signature in the same way that UPS get you to sign for a delivery on a portable device. Is this not possible on a smart phone? – DMC Dec 09 '11 at 09:41
  • If you are simply looking to record signatures that is just a very basic matter of taking touch events and recording them. – Jim Mitchener Dec 09 '11 at 09:43
  • Thanks you. I'll check out that Touch Paint API Demo now. Thats exactly what I was looking for – DMC Dec 09 '11 at 10:13