A Method of Fluorescent Fibers Detection on Identity Documents under Ultraviolet Light

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ridge detection-based method for reliably identifying fluorescent security fibers on identity documents under UV light, overcoming limitations of traditional binarization techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel ridge detection approach with background normalization for fluorescent fiber detection, effective on real passport images.

Findings

Reliable detection of fluorescent fibers achieved

Method outperforms binarization-based approaches

Effective on authentic and model passports

Abstract

In this work we consider the problem of the fluorescent security fibers detection on the images of identity documents captured under ultraviolet light. As an example we use images of the second and third pages of the Russian passport and show features that render known methods and approaches based on image binarization non applicable. We propose a solution based on ridge detection in the gray-scale image of the document with preliminary normalized background. The algorithm was tested on a private dataset consisting of both authentic and model passports. Abandonment of binarization allowed to provide reliable and stable functioning of the proposed detector on a target dataset.