In today's digital world securing different forms of content is
very important in terms of protecting copyright and verifying authenticity. Many techniques have been developed to protect audio, video, digital documents, images, and programs (executable code). One example is watermarking of digital audio and images. We believe that a similar type of protection for printed documents is
very important. The goals of our work are to securely print and trace documents on low cost consumer printers such as inkjet and electrophotographic (laser) printers. We will accomplish this through the use of intrinsic and extrinsic features obtained from modelling the printing process. In this paper we describe the use of image texture analysis to identify the printer used to print a document. In particular we will describe a set of features that can be used to provide forensic information about a document. We will demonstrate our methods using 10 EP printers.
KEYWORDS: Printing, Digital watermarking, Halftones, Image processing, Signal processing, Optical proximity correction, Information security, Data hiding, Forensic science, Security printing
Despite the increase in email and other forms of digital
communication, the use of printed documents continues to increase
every year. Many types of printed documents need to be "secure"
or traceable to the printer that was used to print them. Examples
of these include identity documents (e.g. passports) and documents
used to commit a crime.
Traditional protection methods such as special inks, security
threads, or holograms, can be cost prohibitive. The goals of our
work are to securely print and trace documents on low cost
consumer printers such as inkjet and electrophotographic (laser)
printers. We will accomplish this through the use of intrinsic and
extrinsic features obtained from modelling the printing process.
Specifically we show that the banding artifact in the EP print
process can be viewed as an intrinsic feature of the printer used
to identify both the model and make of the device. Methods for
measuring and extracting the banding signals from documents are
presented. The use of banding as an extrinsic feature is also
explored.
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