Photo-image authentication by pattern recognition and cryptography

Personal identification documents such as ID-cards are being used increasingly for such activities as cashless transactions, entry into restricted areas, and personal verification for medical and government services. With this trend, there is also the increasing trend toward counterfeiting these documents for illegal gain. We present an approach to authenticating photo-ID documents that relies on pattern recognition and cryptography, and has cost and security advantages over physical mechanisms such as holograms that are currently used. The approach is based on a photo-signature that is a concise representation of the photo-image on the document. This photo-signature is stored in a database for remote verification or in encrypted form on the card for self-verification. Verification of the ID document entails scanning both the photo-image and a machine-readable form of the text information, determining the photo-signature, and comparing this information against the reference. In this paper, we describe the method, and present results of testing a large database of images for photo-signature match in the presence of noise