Fully-Automatic Pipeline for Document Signature Analysis to Detect Money Laundering Activities

Signatures present on corporate documents are often used in investigations of relationships between persons of interest, and prior research into the task of offline signature verification has evaluated a wide range of methods on standard signature datasets. However, such tasks often benefit from prior human supervision in the collection, adjustment and labelling of isolated signature images from which all real-world context has been removed. Signatures found in online document repositories such as the United Kingdom Companies House regularly contain high variation in location, size, quality and degrees of obfuscation under stamps. We propose an integrated pipeline of signature extraction and curation, with no human assistance from the obtaining of company documents to the clustering of individual signatures. We use a sequence of heuristic methods, convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks and convolutional Siamese networks for signature extraction, filtering, cleaning and embedding respectively. We evaluate both the effectiveness of the pipeline at matching obscured same-author signature pairs and the effectiveness of the entire pipeline against a human baseline for document signature analysis, as well as presenting uses for such a pipeline in the field of real-world anti-money laundering investigation.

Finding the Ground-Truth from Multiple Labellers: Why Parameters of the Task Matter

Employing multiple workers to label data for machine learning models has become increasingly important in recent years with greater demand to collect huge volumes of labelled data to train complex models while mitigating the risk of incorrect and noisy labelling. Whether it is large scale data gathering on popular crowd-sourcing platforms or smaller sets of workers in high-expertise labelling exercises, there are various methods recommended to gather a consensus from employed workers and establish ground-truth labels. However, there is very little research on how the various parameters of a labelling task can impact said methods. These parameters include the number of workers, worker expertise, number of labels in a taxonomy and sample size. In this paper, Majority Vote, CrowdTruth and Binomial Expectation Maximisation are investigated against the permutations of these parameters in order to provide better understanding of the parameter settings to give an advantage in ground-truth inference. Findings show that both Expectation Maximisation and CrowdTruth are only likely to give an advantage over majority vote under certain parameter conditions, while there are many cases where the methods can be shown to have no major impact. Guidance is given as to what parameters methods work best under, while the experimental framework provides a way of testing other established methods and also testing new methods that can attempt to provide advantageous performance where the methods in this paper did not. A greater level of understanding regarding optimal crowd-sourcing parameters is also achieved.