Feasibility of a Morphological Forensic Document Recovery System for Burnt Documents on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)

摘要

This paper shows research into the development of techniques that can be used to recover what was written on a paper document after attempts have been made to obscure the content via methods such as burning or bleach for example. Here instead of using expensive high-tech imagery and infrared equipment, there is the aim of using off-the-shelf equipment to reduce economic costs in the form of a Sony Ericsson Mobile Phone with a 2.0 mega pixel camera with built in light. The latter was used in the data collection phase after the test documents were produced, various factors were considered here such as light reflection and incident angles on the paper, position of camera, light frequencies, visible light collection and night mode light collection in order to achieve the optimum test image. The FPGA was then brought in for the post-collection processing of the images using techniques currently developed using graphical block methodologies for ease of use, then the best string of operations to obtain the most efficient results of what was previously written will be presented by comparing it to a similar untouched document. The paper then explains the expansions to the experiments which include different types and coloured inks from various sources which include standard pens to inkjet printer cartridges on numerously coloured paper to see how truly effect the developed technique is.