Automatic Documents Counterfeit Classification Using Image Processing And Analysis

Counterfeit detection in official documents has challenged forensic experts on trying to correlate them to improve the identification of forgery authors by criminal investigators. Past counterfeit investigation on the Portuguese Police Forensic Laboratory allowed the construction of an organized set of digital images related to counterfeited documents, helping manual identification of new counterfeiters modus operandi. However, these images are usually stored in distinct resolutions, may have different sizes and could have been captured under different types of illumination.In this paper we present a methodology to automate a counterfeit identification modus operandi, by comparing a given document image with a database of previously catalogued counterfeited documents images. The proposed method ranks the identified counterfeited documents and allows the forensic experts to drive their attention to the most similar documents. It takes advantage of scalable algorithms under the OpenCV framework that compare images, match patterns and analyse textures and colours. We present a set of tests with distinct datasets with promising results.