An optical/digital identification/verification system based on digital watermarking technology

摘要

This paper presents a new approach for the secure integrity verification of driver licenses, passorts or other analogue identification documents. The system embeds (detects) the reference number of the identification document with the DCT watermark technology in (from) the owner photo of the identiifcation document holder. During verification the reference number is textracted and compared with the reference number printed in the identification document. The approach combines optical and digital image processing techniques. The detection system must be able to scan an analogue driver license or passport, convert the image of this document into a digitla representation and then apply the watermark verification algorithm to check the payload of the embedded watermark. If the payload of the watermark is identical with the printed visual reference number of the issuer, the verification was successful and the passport or deriver license has not bene modified. This approach constitutes a new class of application for the watermark technology, which was originally targeted for the copyright protection of digital multimedia data. The presented approach substantially increases the security of the analogue identification documents applied in many European countries.