MSDS: A Large-Scale Chinese Signature and Token Digit String Dataset for Handwriting Verification
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Spotlight, 2022
⭐Official release of the MSDS dataset.
- Usage & Download
- Description
- Collection
- Responsible Use
- Experimental Result
- License
- Directory Format
- Copyright
The MSDS dataset is available for non-commercial research purposes only. To request access, please follow these steps:
Step 1: Download and complete both agreement documents:
Have both documents signed and stamped by your institution. Please also prepare 1–2 recent publications (within the last 6 years) as evidence that you or your team conduct research in handwriting verification, handwriting analysis and recognition, document image processing, or related fields.
Step 2: Submit your application online:
Upload both signed documents through the portal. Your application will be reviewed manually and you will be notified by email once a decision has been made (typically within 3–5 business days).
Step 3: Download the dataset:
After approval, you will receive the download link and decompression password via email.
⚠️ All users must comply with the use conditions at all times; failure to do so will result in revocation of access.
MSDS dataset is a handwriting verification benchmark dataset and consists of two subsets: MSDS-ChS (for Chinese signatures) and MSDS-TDS (for Token Digit Strings). Each subset contains 16080 samples from 402 users, with 20 genuine samples and 20 skilled forgeries per user. The details are presented below:
| Subset | Content | Online | Offline | User | Genuine Sample | Skilled Forgery | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSDS-ChS | Chinese Signature | ✓ | ✓ | 402 | |||
| MSDS-TDS | Token Digit String | ✓ | ✓ | 402 |
The contributions of MSDS include:
- MSDS-ChS is the largest publicly available Chinese signature dataset for signature for signature verification, at least eight times larger than existing ones.
- MSDS-TDS is the first dataset that covers Token Digit String, which brings a new and effective biometric for handwriting verification.
- The experimental results indicates that the Token Digit String is more powerful than Chinese signature, which is inspiring and promising.
The data of MSDS was acquired with two types of Android tablets. Both of them have specific stylus. We specifically developed an Android app and the user interface is shown below. Users directly performed handwriting on the tablets with specific styluses and the produced information was automatically recorded by the app.
The data acquisition process is divided into two separate sessions with a time interval of at least 21 days. In each session, users performed writing according to the same procedure: 10 genuine signatures→10 genuine phone numbers→10 forged signatures→10 forged phone numbers.
MSDS is collected for handwriting identity verification. Specifically, the MSDS-ChS subset could be exploited in online/offline Chinese signature verification, and the MSDS-TDS subset is intended to be used in online/offline identity verification with Token Digit Strings. In addition, MSDS can be exploited in writer identification.
Experimental results show all models perform better on MSDS-TDS than MSDS-ChS. This finding is inspiring that the accuracy of TDS verification is higher than that of Chinese signature verification as the two subsets were collected simultaneously. Therefore, Token Digit String could be a more effective biometric trait than Chinese signature for high-accurate online verification.
MSDS should be used and distributed under Creative Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License for non-commercial research purposes.
The dataset is organized in the following directory format:
├─MSDS
│ ├─MSDS-ChS
│ │ ├─session1
│ │ │ ├─0
│ │ │ │ ├─images
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ │ └─series
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ ├─1
│ │ │ │ ├─images
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ │ └─series
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ └─...
│ │ └─session2
│ │ ├─...
│ └─MSDS-TDS
│ │ ├─session1
│ │ │ ├─0
│ │ │ │ ├─images
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ │ └─series
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ ├─1
│ │ │ │ ├─images
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.png
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.png
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ │ └─series
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─f_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─...
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_0.txt
│ │ │ │ │ ├─g_0_1.txt
│ │ │ │ │ └─...
│ │ │ └─...
│ └─session2
│ │ ├─...- The
MSDS-ChSfolder contains Chinese signatures andMSDS-TDScontains Token Digit Strings (TDS). - Each of them contains the data in two sessions which is stored in
session1andsession2. - The users are arranged from
0to401, with online dynamic time series and offline static images provided inseriesandimages. The time series are saved as.txtfiles and the images are in.pngformat. - The naming of each file follows the same format:
flag_user_index. -
flagisforg.findicates that this file is a skilled forgery, whilegindicates that it is a genuine sample.
-
userindicates the number of user of this file.
-
indexindicates the number of this file (.txtor.png) in the current folder.
-
- For example,
f_0_0.txtrepresents the first file (time series) of all skilled forgeries of the user0.g_5_6.pngrepresents the seventh file (image) of all genuine samples of the user5.
- For example,
@inproceedings{zhang2022msds,
author = {Zhang, Peirong and Jiang, Jiajia and Liu, Yuliang and Jin, Lianwen},
booktitle = {{Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)}},
pages = {36507--36519},
title = {{MSDS: A Large-Scale Chinese Signature and Token Digit String Dataset for Handwriting Verification}},
volume = {35},
year = {2022}
}
For commercial purpose usage, please contact Prof. Lianwen Jin: eelwjin@scut.edu.cn.
Copyright 2022-2025, Deep Learning and Vision Computing Lab, South China China University of Technology.

