Printing variability of copy detection patterns

TL;DR

This paper investigates the variability in copy detection pattern (CDP) printing using digital offset printers, highlighting factors affecting authentication performance and providing a new dataset for industrial applications.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive analysis of how printer type, substrate, and resolution influence CDP variability, introducing a new dataset from industrial HP Indigo printers.

Findings

Printer and substrate choice significantly affect CDP similarity.

Digital offset printing introduces variability impacting authentication.

New dataset enables large-scale industrial evaluation.

Abstract

Copy detection pattern (CDP) is a novel solution for products' protection against counterfeiting, which gains its popularity in recent years. CDP attracts the anti-counterfeiting industry due to its numerous benefits in comparison to alternative protection techniques. Besides its attractiveness, there is an essential gap in the fundamental analysis of CDP authentication performance in large-scale industrial applications. It concerns variability of CDP parameters under different production conditions that include a type of printer, substrate, printing resolution, etc. Since digital off-set printing represents great flexibility in terms of product personalized in comparison with traditional off-set printing, it looks very interesting to address the above concerns for digital off-set printers that are used by several companies for the CDP protection of physical objects. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate certain factors impacting CDP. The experimental results obtained during our study reveal some previously unknown results and raise new and even more challenging questions. The results prove that it is a matter of great importance to choose carefully the substrate or printer for CDP production. This paper presents a new dataset produced by two industrial HP Indigo printers. The similarity between printed CDP and the digital templates, from which they have been produced, is chosen as a simple measure in our study. We found several particularities that might be of interest for large-scale industrial applications.