ABSTRACT:This paper presents a variant of local binary pattern called Blockwise Binary Pattern (BBP) for the offline signature verification. The proposed approach has three major phases : Preprocessing, Feature extraction and Classification. In the feature extraction phase, the signature is divided into 3 x 3 neighborhood blocks. A BBP value for central pixel of each block is computed by considering its 8 neighboring pixels and the 3 x 3 block is replaced by this central pixel. To compute BBP value for each block, a binary sequence is formed by considering 8 neighbors of the central pixel, by following the pixels in a anti-clockwise direction. Then the minimum decimal equivalent of this binary sequence is computed and this value is assigned to the central pixel. The central pixel is merged with the neighboring 8 pixels representing the 3 X 3 neighborhood block. This method is found to be invariant to rotation, scaling and shift of the signature. The features are stored in the form of normalized histogram. The SVM classifier is used for the signature verification. Experiments have been performed on standard signature datasets namely CEDAR and GPDS which are publicly available English signature datasets and on MUKOS, a regional language (Kannada) dataset and compared with the well-known approaches to exhibit the performance of the proposed approach.