Tartan Threads : a method for the real-time digital recognition of secure documents in ink-jet printers

Thanks to today's digital imaging technology, any ten year old child with basic computer skills can create convincing counterfeit currency. It comes as no surprise that as output quality and costs have improved in ink-jet printers, there has been a corresponding surge in digital counterfeiting of security documents. The design of a system, through which a printer can recognize a security or other protected document though identification of a watermark, presents a challenge for the application of information hiding techniques. The marking should be strong enough to provide certainty that a document was intentionally marked and robust enough to withstand the transformations inherent in the scanning and printing process. Using an extended spread­spectrum technique, a small one-dimensional thread encoded with a known multi-bit signature is generated. If the printer detects a match, printing halts and a warning message is output to the user. By applying several such threads at varying orientations, this can provide an effective first line of defense against the casual digital counterfeiter.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1999

Author dc:creator

• Paiz, Fernando J. (Fernando Joaquin), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Walter Bender.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9797

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9797