Debian was not generally seen as a bleeding-edge distribution, but it offered a perfect combination of stability and up-to-date software in our field when we chose the platform for our signature verification project. Having an active Debian Developer in the team also helped ensuring that packages which we use were in good shape when the freeze, then the release came and we can still rely on Jessie images with only a few extra packages to run our software stack.

Not having to worry about the platform, we could concentrate on the core project and I’m proud to announce that our start-up‘s algorithm won this year’s Signature Verification Competition for Online Skilled Forgeries (SigWIComp2015) . The more detailed story can be read already in the English business news and is also on index.hu, a leading Hungarian news site. We are also working on a solution for categorizing users based on cursor/finger movements for targeting content, offers and ads better. This is also covered in the articles.

László – a signature comparable in quality to the reference signatures

The verification task was not easy. The reference signatures were recorded at very low resolution and frequency and the forgers did a very good job in forging them creating a true challenge for everyone competing. At first glance it is hard to imagine that there is usable information in such small amount of recorded data, but our software is already better than me, for example in telling the difference between genuine and forged signatures. It feels like when the chess program beats the programmer again and again. 🙂

I would like to thank you all, who helped making Debian an awesome universal operating system and hope we can keep making every release better and better!