Automatic counterfeit protection system code classification

Wide availability of cheap high-quality printing techniques make document forgery an easy task that can easily be done by most people using standard computer and printing hardware. To prevent the use of color laser printers or color copiers for counterfeiting e.g. money or other valuable documents, many of these machines print Counterfeit Protection System (CPS) codes on the page. These small yellow dots encode information about the specific printer and allow the questioned document examiner in cooperation with the manufacturers to track down the printer that was used to generate the document. However, the access to the methods to decode the tracking dots pattern is restricted. The exact decoding of a tracking pattern is often not necessary, as tracking the pattern down to the printer class may be enough. In this paper we present a method that detects what CPS pattern class was used in a given document. This can be used to specify the printer class that the document was printed on. Evaluation proved an accuracy of up to 91%.