The Evolution of Document Authentication

Authentication in the document context refers to the ability to trace the origins of a document to a given person or device used to produce it or to a given time or place it was produced. The general approach typically involves comparing physical, visual and/or linguistic properties of a questioned source to reproducible properties of a known or genuine source. The challenges lie in defining acceptable variations between authentic sources and identifying distinguishing characteristics of forgeries or unknown sources. As documents have evolved from physical objects made with primitive devices to manuscripts created by machine to content that lives only in electronic form, methods for authentication have also changed. While there has been considerable work in attempts to automate problems such as signature verification and writer identification in the image domain, and to guarantee authenticity or prove authorship in the electronic text domain, other authentication tasks have continued to rely extensively on human expertise. This talk will overview the general concept of authentication and discuss some of the novel approaches that can be used to authenticate documents and detect forgeries. While technology advances in archeology, antiquities, forensics, security and business are driving new and better ways to perform authentication, they are also enabling more realistic ways to produce counterfeits. As we continue to make progress in automating various analysis and recognition tasks, the question remains as to how well we will be able to automate these highly expert driven authentication tasks.