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How Soon Before We Get a Search Engine that Can ID Signatures?

I'm wondering if there will be a search tool developed any time soon that will be able to identify autographs by searching for matches on the internet. If I have a signed photo, I can identify the signer about 75% of the time by doing a Google photo search. It doesn't work for signatures, though. If you upload a scanned signature, it matches the paper and size of the signature, not the pattern the ink makes. Has anyone heard of anyone trying to create this sort of tool?

I have a lot of unidentified signatures from a collection of 19th Century autographs I bought. A lot. Like, maybe a thousand.The collection came to me in piles, nothing organized at all. I identified some really nice autographs before I finally gave up and stashed the ones I can't identify in a box. I would love to have a way to figure some of them out.

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on September 13, 2023 at 2:44pm

A) I don't know. It might be good for Autopens initially anyway. Can't say.

B) Obscure items would be the last (or first) thing to be sought?

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Permalink Reply by Eddy on September 13, 2023 at 2:57pm

I don't know so much about the question regarding the search engine. However, your 19th century autograph collection sounds cool to me.....and a signature detective's delight!

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Permalink Reply by Eric Keith Longo on September 13, 2023 at 3:23pm

My days of Sherlock and Mycroft are behind me, not in Cunard liner fitting authentications, but here certainly; 1000 unidentified signatures sounds like real work. Or someones dream!

Below is an Elgin pocket watch mechanism, in its shipping box, that sank with the Lusitania on May 7th, 1915.

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Permalink Reply by Will McIntosh on September 14, 2023 at 11:28am

I had a blast identifying the signatures. I spent many hours poring over them. The ones that remain are just utterly illegible, and don't contain any helpful clues. So for now they'll just remain in that box. I'm hoping one day there's a search engine precise enough to unlock them.

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Permalink Reply by Eddy on September 14, 2023 at 11:55am

Sounds like it was fun! Are they in various fields of interest (eg. politics, authors, stage, royalty, etc.)?

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Permalink Reply by Yony Mark on September 28, 2023 at 1:19pm

I think it would be an absolute pain to develop such a thing, let alone see it in practice. Such a could also be easily manipulated to be filled with forgeries, the same way that social media algorithms got manipulated with racism, fake news, hate speech, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Will McIntosh on September 28, 2023 at 6:00pm

I think I'm imagining something different than you. I'm not suggesting someone upload a bunch of examples of signatures that you could use to identify unknown signatures. I'm thinking of a search engine such as Google that is sensitive enough that it can match an unidentified signature to similar signatures that are already on the internet. Right now, if I upload a photo of Barbra Streisand to Google as an image search, the search engine can recognize her facial features well enough to provide dozens of matches to other, different photos of Barbra Streisand. The same with, say, the Taj Mahal. But if you run an image search on a signature, the matches are just other random signatures. The search engine isn't sensitive enough to distinguish, say, Barbra Streisand's signature from John Wayne's. If there are programs that can distinguish between faces, it seems like it's not a big leap to design programs that can match signatures.

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Permalink Reply by Yony Mark on September 29, 2023 at 5:45am

Yeah, I understand what you mean, it's just that forgeries are way too common for such a thing to be 'clean'. Forgeries of faces are also a thing with Midjourney and such.

If I'd want to identify a signature, I'd like it to be matched with another legitimate signature. The same way you'd like to see other different legitimate photos of Barbra Streisand.