An off-line signature verification system based on contour features is presented. It works at the local image level, and encodes directional properties of signature contours and the length of regions enclosed inside letters. Results obtained on a sub-corpus of the MCYT signature database shows that directional-based features work much better than length-based features. Results are comparable to existing approaches based on different features. It is also observed that combination of the proposed features does not provide improvements in performance, maybe to some existing correlation among them.