Passive Classification of Source Printer using Text-line-level Geometric Distortion Signatures from Scanned Images of Printed Documents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for identifying the source printer of printed documents by analyzing geometric distortion signatures at the text line level, achieving high accuracy even with limited training data.

Contribution

It proposes a new set of features based on geometric distortions and a system that effectively classifies printers, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Achieves 99% accuracy with minimal training data

Effective across multiple fonts and printers

State-of-the-art classification performance

Abstract

In this digital era, one thing that still holds the convention is a printed archive. Printed documents find their use in many critical domains such as contract papers, legal tenders and proof of identity documents. As more advanced printing, scanning and image editing techniques are becoming available, forgeries on these legal tenders pose a serious threat. Ability to easily and reliably identify source printer of a printed document can help a lot in reducing this menace. During printing procedure, printer hardware introduces certain distortions in printed characters' locations and shapes which are invisible to naked eyes. These distortions are referred as geometric distortions, their profile (or signature) is generally unique for each printer and can be used for printer classification purpose. This paper proposes a set of features for characterizing text-line-level geometric distortions, referred as geometric distortion signatures and presents a novel system to use them for identification of the origin of a printed document. Detailed experiments performed on a set of thirteen printers demonstrate that the proposed system achieves state of the art performance and gives much higher accuracy under small training size constraint. For four training and six test pages of three different fonts, the proposed method gives 99\% classification accuracy.

Full text

See pages 1-last of draft.pdf