Fingerprinting Blank Paper and Printed Material by Smartphones

This work shows a fingerprint method for the unique identification of blank and printed paper by a smartphone. This allows a secure authentication by authorities or end users of products or documents. The digital file includes no hidden data. The fingerprint method uses uncontrollable printing variabilities and paper structure as features. The uncontrollable variabilities are mapped into a binary sequnce, which is used as representation of the features and acts as our fingerprint. The variabilities can be extracted from low and high quality paper as well as from printed material created with low-cost office printers and high-end offset printing machines. Based on this fingerprint, various applications can be realized where the distinction between original and copy or forgery is essential, such as piracy of packaging, tickets, coupons or official documents. From the results of the evaluation it can be concluded that the proposed method is independent of the smartphones used, the paper, the printing technology and the color temperature of the ambient light. Furthermore, the test results show that the proposed method works robustly at different distances, from the smartphone camera to the paper.