ONLINE PUBLICATIONS [B] http://www.pffc-online.com/mag/brand-protection-with-micro-dots/index.html
The object of the present invention is an apparatus and associated methods, based on fluorescence effect applied to brand protection or anti-theft. A plurality of randomly spaced fluorescent entities such as particles specs, dots, fibers and other inclusions with chaotically distributed properties of both static and dynamic nature embedded in a product in a non separable way form a unique taggant thus establishing a solid product item authentication. The mentioned taggant is used as a unique non reproducible product's fingerprint with its attributes encoded and stored as a template by Encoder. Positive cross match of the two performed by Decoder provides authentication.
Currently, manufacturers all over the world incur substantial losses due to counterfeiters illegally fabricating fake products and carrying original brand names. These forged items are difficult to identify, since they are reproduced as exact replicas of the original products, and are often indistinguishable from the genuine ones. The costs to manufacturers are accompanied by losses to consumers. The later occurs due to lost quality and serious safety issues. Such high price items as designer apparel, art collector items, safety critical products (f.e. aviation military spare parts), drugs, foods are especially vulnerable to counterfeiting because of substantial financial losses and risk to human lives involved, not to mention the reputation loss to respective companies. All mentioned factors make brand protection a critical part of the modern global markets.
Numerous anti counterfeiting approaches and technologies have been developed. Among the solutions are hard to copy high tech labels and signs on the product surface revealed only under special condition by a special sensor. Among more recent solutions are 2D bar code labels containing the product info, various tags ranging from field readable to forensic, laminated labels, various inks: DNA, Color Shift, Invisible, UV-Visible, IR-Visible, tax stamps, holograms, and thermochromics and RF IDs. These methods, however did not deliver a desired result due to a high degree of the skills exhibited by the counterfeiters motivated by high profit margins.
Recent advances in electronics, sensing (optical, audio, electrical, etc.) and information processing technology created challenges for brand protection, but also provided new tools to tackle the problem. A new family of techniques, which is often named by generic term chaosmetrics appeared.
Ontology of term chaosmetrics is analogous to the term biometrics. The field of biometrics aims at establishing a unique person's identity from its biological characteristics such as a fingerprint, face, palm, gait, etc. Similarly chaosmetrics uses a combination of random (chaotic) but measurable physical characteristics-attributes already existing or purposefully embedded into a product item in a non separable way in order to establish the item's identity.
Originally the chaosmetric applications were based mostly on markings observable in visible wavelengths on product item surface. The collections of these markings represent hard to reproduce patterns. They are often sufficiently unique to verify the product item's identity. Growing availability of CCD/CMOS sensors with increased optical resolution, and other high SNR sensors enabled measurements with a sufficient degrees of precision and resolution in order to reveal the discrepancies in product's physical characteristics of different product items.
Most importantly, many of the aforementioned characteristics, exhibit such an unreproducible complexity, which cannot be easily replicated even by a well equipped manufacturer. It quickly became apparent, that plurality of chaosmetric attributes-characteristics could serve as an identifying fingerprint or taggant of particular product item. This taggant can be used in order to provide the chosen attribute set which is sufficiently salient across the product copies, stable over time, quality neutral and extractable with the existing sensor technology. A compact representation of such a “fingerprint or template may be stored in an indexed data base or embedded directly on the product in a readable format for subsequent cross matching with the taggant content by the product buyer. An authentication apparatus and the respective method based on fluorescence phenomena is the subject of the present invention.
A number of chaosmetrics based anti-counterfeiting solutions has been developed over the last 20 years. From U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,56814 and 6,425,606 B1 it is known that optical diffraction effect can generate document specific patterns which could be used to authenticate product item or a document. A surface located key element which is used for diffraction-optical authenticating produces at least one chromatic pattern forming an optically measurable unique feature. This represents a taggant used to verify the document authenticity or a product item.
From U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,363,202, 5,533,144, 5,533,144, it is known that a fine pattern may be embedded into a document or currency which is revealed only during the copying by a copy machine in order to prevent generating copies that look very similar to the original.
From U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,717, 6,553,136 B1 and European patent No EP 1 096 433 A2, it is known that the embedded optical (image) pattern can be scrambled/encrypted or otherwise obfuscated and subsequently to be cross compared with the template which is created by a training with a purpose to protect a document against forgery. It is important to note that the image requiring large space rather than a compact feature set is proposed in this patent.
From European patent No EP 1 564 680 A1, it is known that an optical pattern, extracted from product item for the purpose of authentication may be stored in encrypted form using a private key and read for cross comparison using a public key. This patent also uses an image rather than a feature set with the same storage consequences.
From European patent No EP 1 096 433 A2, it is known that a unique visual pattern from an image on the product surface which may be further cross compared with a previously stored template using a special kernel.
From U.S. Pat. No. 6,868,174 B2, it is known that a validation code may be used for product authentication.
From US patent application 2006/0104103 A1, it is known that visual illuminated speckle patterns created from backscattering of illumination light by an embossed structure due to superposition of two materials with different refractive indecis could be used for product authentication.
From US patent application No 2008/0002882 A1, it is known that a manufacturer generated PID integrated into the product packaging and stored into the distribution data base could be cross matched, thus giving a product item identification.
From the on-line publication [B] by Alp Vision Corp, it is known that a set of hidden micro points printed over the entire surface of the primary or secondary packaging can be used for for the production authentication. Among such micro-points are the ones on the blister foil for packaged foods and medical supplies. These points may or may not be observable under visible light. They cover the whole surface of the packaging and are printed in a non reproducible way. These points may contain encrypted information, which can only be deciphered by using the encryption key. If the verification process is performed in a unique and secured place, the key is very secure.
From the U.S. Pat. No. 7,222,791 B2, it is known that authentication of a product item may be performed by cross validation of a taggant with the template (bar code, RF ID, etc.) on the product or with the information data base available to the retailer, distributor and manufacturer. Note here that the cross validation is applied here on the raw plain text data which may easily be subjected to an attack.
From US patent application No 2007/0028107 A1, it is known that a medical prescription could be reliably authenticated by using intrinsic physical properties of the medicament entitlement token in order to generate a unique signature for each token being produced. The signature then is verified through the medical network.
From US patents application No 2008/0002882, U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,249,350 B2 A1, 8,542,871 B2, US patent application No 2012/0298743 A1, it is known that manufacturer generated PIN embedded into the product packaging in a hidden form may be used for authentication of product items.
From the U.S. Pat. No. 8,245,932 B2, it is known that a physical chaotic characteristics on a product item substrate could be encoded in a bar code for further cross comparison for the item authentication.
From the Voxtel Inc publication by Photonics Online, by G. Williams, it is known that a physical chaotic pattern may be implemented as nanoparticles security coating.
From U.S. Pat. No. 8,705,873 B2, it is known that a micro structure image of a product item could serve as a chaotic unreproducible pattern for product authentication. It is also known, that a template could be made more secure by using a special type of non-invertible transformation described in the patent in addition to the encryption already covered by the on-line publication [B.]
From Fluorescent Nanoparticles for Ion Sensing Erlangung, Ph.D. Dissertation, it is known that phosphorescent materials generally have much longer after-emission lifetimes than one for a typical fluorescent process due to a different role of electron's spin. As it turns out fluorescent spin causes energy transition process to occur with faster emission rates and hence, it results in much shorter fluorescence lifetimes in the range of a few nanosecond as compared with milliseconds and above for phosphorescence which is a special case of fluorescence.
A special family of the counterfeiting optical taggants are the ones based on the effect known in non linear optics: From the aforementioned dissertation we also know that the fluorescence is a non linear optical effect which is an longer wavelength light emission after being exposed to light of a shorter wavelength. A taggant containing entities of fluorescent materials, may be embedded in a product item in a way, which may not even be observable by human eye, unless it is activated by ultraviolet illumination. The technical difficulties of manufacturing of such a taggant may often prove to be insurmountable for a counterfeiters so feature serve as a brand protection feature.
The named emission properties of some materials make them fluorescent or phosphorescent which is directly relevant to the object of this invention. The time characteristics of the phosphorescent post emission are especially important since their values are large enough so that they can be reliably measured using readily available devices, such as a cell phone camera.
From Invitrogen publication technical resource Guide for Fluorescence Polarization we know that light emitted by many fluorescent materials may have different degree of polarization which depends on the incident polarization in a complex way, and chemical composition of the material. The estimate of the degree of polarization may be performed as a weighted mean of two light magnitudes filtered by perpendicularly oriented polarized filters.
From publication Tunable photoluminescence and spectrum split from fluorinated to hydroxylated graphene by P. Gong, J. Wang et al. we know that a graphene based fluorescent material hydroxylated graphene (HOG) made from fluorinated graphene exhibits a high degree of tunable emission with wavelength ranging from greenish white (343 . . . 392 nm) to deep blue (156 . . . 94 nm) nanometers. From the 3 aforementioned references we also can conclude that all these characteristics can be a basis of a particular embodiment of a dynamic fluorescent chaosmetric solution.
From Fluorescence Hyperspectral Imaging Counterfeit Currency Detection and Analysis, by Horiba Scientific we know that: fluorescent emission spectrum depends on the chemical additions and could be tuned by changing the chemical composition of the fluorescent compound. Hence such fluorescence properties as emission and absorption spectra, polarization and time delay and time decay characteristics may be tunable and highly variable. Fluorescent logo proposed described in patent application US2013, 0270457, distinguishes a bona fide product from a counterfeit one. Such a high variability also allows chaosmetric solutions.
From Genuine U.S. Currency Production, Security Features, and Counterfeiting by Ken Huffer SAIC Phoenix Field Office, U.S. Department of Homeland Security United States Secret Service we know that fluorescent fiber features may be used for currency anti-counterfeiting.
From European patent 88309627.3 we know that fluorescent compounds can be used in the security of the printed documents, checks, banknotes, ID, credit cards etc.
From Synthesis of a Unique Fluorescent Material to Print onto Medications for use in the Anti-Counterfeiting of Pharmaceuticals by Jamie Kern we know that fluorescent particles can be used for anti-counterfeiting of pharmaceutical products. It turns out that fluorescent inks could be made safe enough to be pharmaceutical pills for human consumption.
From U.S. Pat. No. 7,874,489 B2 it is known that fluorescent dyes in the form of arrays may be used for the product authentication. We know that indica fluorescent material can provide a plurality of the emission colors which could be used for anti-counterfeiting.
From U.S. Pat. No. 8,034,398 B2 it is known that multivariate fluorescence codes may be used as secure taggants for brand protection. The codes may he a result of digitization of spectral characteristics of the fluorescent entities contained in the taggant. Indeed, high variety of the multi spectral emission characteristic could be used as a code once digitized in any readable format.
From publication US 2002/0066543 A1, it is known that fluorescent microparticles in a pigmented fluorescent coating could be utilized in order to increase the document security. A collection of such micro-particles has inclusions with salient spectral characteristics and intensities different from the background.
From US 2003/0003323 A1 it is known that it is not necessary on practice (Stokes Law) to have UV rays as activation source for the fluorescence as long as the activation/absorption source has a shorter wavelength than the emitted spectrum. Moreover the activation wavelengths may even be infrared if emitted spectrum has still a larger wavelength. Hence such infrared emitting particles with infrared activation may also be used in for anti-counterfeiting of the special document paper.
From the patent application US 2010/0062194 A1 it is known that a pattern, invisible under normal light condition and containing a plurality of the fluorescent particles may be used for the anti-counterfeiting.
From patent application US 2013/0270457 A1 it is known that fluorescent dye incorporated in silica material arranged in a human readable pattern, such as sequence of symbols can be used for anti-counterfeiting
From U.S. Pat. No. 7,289,205 B2 a method is known how fluorescence polarization imaging devices and methods, polarization of the fluorescent emission could be measured efficiently and precisely.
From the publication Silver Nanoparticles As Fluorescent Probes: New Approach for Bio-imaging by Ajeet Singh, Shalinee Jha, Garima Srivastava, Preeti Sarkar, Prerana Gogoi it is known that silver nanoparticles possessing fluorescent properties could be created using chemical reduction of silver nitrate and characterized using NMR and FT-IR and could be injected into the human body for medical imaging. The use of such particles indicates the existence of fluorescent materials which are safe for humans, hence may be used for the medical products with other purposes for anti-counterfeiting of the pharmaceutical products.
From the publication Cellulose Acetate Fibers with Fluorescing Nanoparticles by Erin Hendricket et al. it is known that fluorescent Nanoparticles such as Cornell dots incorporated in cellulose fibers could be used for anti-counterfeiting.
From Size- and Shape-Dependent Fluorescence Quenching of Gold Nanoparticles on Perylene Dye by Chenming Xue , Yuhua Xue et al. at wileyonlinelibrary.com it is known that the gold nanoparticles have fluorescent properties in the range 600 nanometers and up.
From Fluorescence Detection of Counterfeit US Currency by Jasco, Inc publication we know that fluorescent patterns may be used in for the counterfeit detection in the US currency.
From Cellulose Acetate Fibers with Fluorescing Nanoparticles for Anti-counterfeiting and pH-sensing Applications by Erin Hendrick et al. we know fluorescent particles can be used for anti-counterfeiting.
From Fluorescent Semiconductor Nanocrystal, A Proposing Fluorescent Anti-Counterfeiting material for specialty paper by Chec et al. we know that the nano-crystals can be used for the anti-counterfeiting if embedded in specialty paper. This fact is directly relevant to the object of the present invention. The time characteristics of the phosphorescent post emission are large enough so they can be easily measured. In many other cases for other fluorescent particles the emission delay times are only of the order of 10-100 nanoseconds and cannot be measured reliably using such handy and available devices as a cell phone with an appropriate software.
As it should be clear from the aforementioned, the use of fluorescence effects in its static, non encrypted, non transformed, non chaosmetrics forms, without misleading chaffs features, for the brand protection is well known and disclosed in the aforementioned patents and scientific publications. Using embedded fluorescent taggants detectable in visible light after exposure with UV light is also well known. Unfortunately many of the said non-chaosmetrics solutions may be bypassed by sophisticated counterfeiters who now have an access to modern technology. Existing chaosmetrics solutions while exhibiting a high degree of irreproducibility lacks a systematic and comprehensive framework, lacks attribute value variability, lack of template protection from a possible cryptographic attacks. Raw image based chaosmetrics solutions normally have unnecessarily high memory storage requirements, while the actual relevant chaotic information is contained in relatively few chaotic features. Hence a compact representation is possible and further improvements are still desirable. The most of aforementioned proposed chaosmetrics solutions use patterns lacking complexity, noise resistance, and variability and takes a more space in a template than it should.
The present invention discloses a novel chaosmetrics taggant type based on plurality of fluorescent entities. It also discloses two novel layers of non-cryptographic template protection such as as non invertible transformation, LED sequence encoding. Introducing the time dimension into the paradigm (dynamics), polarization, and 3D dimension into the feature geometry adds more salience to chaosmetrics attributes. All these novelties together are targeted at providing a chaosmetric solution with a higher degree of product uniqueness and more controlled template security.
The foregoing and other issues are overcome, and other advantages are realized, in accordance with the preferred embodiments of the present invention. These advantages are a wider variety of the chaosmetrics taggant attributes, better chaosmetrics template security and better template compactness. This represents an improvement over the prior art since the application of the mentioned innovations makes the task of the counterfeiter difficult by increasing chaosmetrics complexity with fluorescent based solution through multiple levels. The present invention utilizes randomness of entities attributes for anti counterfeiting and may be utilized on a wide range types of product items in order to confirm if they are genuine. The present invention discloses a method and apparatus which provides a novel chaosmetrics taggant of a higher variability, comprising template with better error resistance and better protection from tampering, a more compact storage along with the associated Encoder and Decoder.
Chaosmetrics is a method establishing a unique product item identity with a purpose of anti-counterfeiting or anti-theft. It is based on using already existing (case I), or purposefully embedded (case II) non reproducible random characteristics of the product item or its part, which are easy to measure, performance neutral and stable within nominal environment conditions.
The present invention is centered around a particular instance of chaosmetrics fluorescent/phosphorescence effects, described in the background section. The chaos source is plurality of fluorescent entities such as specs, particles, dots, fibers, inclusions, etc. molded into a translucent medium of 2D or 3D shape. These entities have a wide variety of fluorescent static and dynamic properties-attributes, including but not limited to emission spectra, polarization, post-emission lifetimes, response times. The said properties are dependent on particular chemical composition of each entity in addition to randomness of 2D/3D geometric coordinates. Random (chaotic) relative locations of plurality of fluorescent entities along with the said properties constitute a non reproducible unique fingerprint of a product item, thus giving it a unique identity, very much like a such biometric identifier as a human fingerprint. Hence the term chaosmetrics is used.
Using chaosmetrics fluorescent entities embedded in a product item's taggant, introduction of several novel attributes, introduction of two non cryptographic security layers for template protection, are the main novelties of the present invention. The first novelty group is introduction of polarization degree, emission spectrum and the respective lifetimes as chaosmetrics properties. The second novelty group is introduction of new dimensions: such dynamic features of the fluorescent entities as the response time and the lifetime of their post illumination and the third space dimension for 3D taggant. The third group of novelties is introduction of the LED bases activation apparatus and the method in which the mentioned plurality of the fluorescent entities is activated and post processing of the received properties. Finally, the last novelty group is non invertible attribute transformation and adding chaffs entities to the template. The fake features chaffs further confuse anyone attempting to reverse engineer. In order to improve template protection since the said transformation allows to perform a match directly on the transformed representation without ever opening the original.
There are three important aspects disclosed as a part of this invention. First is taggant enriched by plurality of fluorescent entities embedded into a product item. The second aspect is attributes associated with the aforementioned entities values extraction, digitizing and storage of as a template, later in the text refereed as Encoding. The third aspect is Decoding, where the aforementioned taggant and the template are extracted and cross matched in order to verify the product's identity.
Three aforementioned aspects corresponds to three stages of the data processing. First is the embedding of the fluorescent taggant. This process may be integrated into a fabrication process specific to the product item, or in a preferred embodiment may already be present as a performance neutral byproduct of the manufacturing process. It thus creates a unique fluorescent pattern serving as a product item's “fingerprint”. As in the field of fingerprinting, there are at least two more processes: Enrollment(or Encoding) and the Verification (or Decoding).
Encoding is reading the taggant and template generation. It may comprise a chaotic fluorescent taggant creation performed by the manufacturer or as a preferred embodiment be an natural performance neutral byproduct of a normal fabrication process. The attribute value read from the aforementioned taggant may be subjected to a non invertible transformation as in [19] and may be further complemented with error correction overhead, compressed and encrypted using a private key. The introduction of these processes improves the error resistance and security of a template and makes it more compact. The first two steps are performed by the manufacturer. During the Encode process a unique combination of fluorescent attributes extracted from the taggant may also be extracted after aforementioned fluorescent entities contained in the taggant get activated by an array of LEDs emitting a particular illumination pattern. As a next step these entities further gets stored into an indexed data base or a easily readable template-representation located on the device.
The third, Decode stage, my be performed by product user or buyer: the said taggant is read along with the template, both located on the product item. Then the said tempate and the taggant may be cross matched in order to verify the authenticity. Alternatively, the said template may be located in a remote data base and get extracted remotely by applying the Decoder.
Encoder apparatus may comprise the following components. LED array based activator serving purpose of light activation pattern generation. A particular emission pattern may be designed in a fashion tailored to a particular product in order to reveal maximal salience among the fluorescent attributes being extracted. The LED array may illuminate the taggant via at least two polarized filters, which may be oriented perpendicularly relative to each other, if polarization properties are included in 2D/3D attribute list.
The Encoder may further comprise at least one camera which may posses stereo abilities. Each of its two objectives has at least one polarizing filter. The said Encoder may also include a computing device for digital processing and a template storage device placing a template into a product in a compact readable form. At least two polarizing filters may be positioned between the LED array and the product item may be used for polarization attribute measurement.
The Decoder may comprise at least one camera, and at least two polarized filers for passing the light from the product, both identical to the camera included in the Encoder. The product item may include taggant comprising a plurality of fluorescent entities located on the surface of the product and aforementioned template (characters, bar code or otherwise readable representation) located in a close proximity to each other, so that they both may be read by the same camera. The Decoder may also comprise a computation device configured to decrypt and matching the template content with the attributes extracted from the taggant and perform any other relevant computations. Decoder may also comprise of an applicable template reader and communication capabilities.
The aforementioned taggant containing characteristics-entities and associated attributes represent points of interest known in art of computer vision. A collection of the said entities may be used fo object match by the experts in the art. Another well known example of such points is fingerprint minutia actively used in art of automatic fingerprint recognition. Both mentioned groups of points of interest have a number of associated attributes possing a high degree of the scale, rotation, intensity and affine transformation invariance. While fingerprint points of interests minutia have associated locations, angles and curvatures, similarly the fluorescent particles, inclusions, fibers have associated location and emission spectra, degrees of polarization and various emission time characteristics as their respective attributes.
Further particular methods, approaches and structure of the apparatus of the subject invention will become more apparent from detailed description of embodiments together with respective drawings.
In the first embodiment of the present invention particular fluorescent taggant may be chosen for a product off line by a physical measurements and the respective attribute values of entities contained in taggant 27 of
The present invention introduces the use of error correction 21,
The aforementioned preferred embodiment is illustrated by
Taggant 27
The said taggant 27
One possible way of a 3D taggant creation is shown in
The said template 22 of
A structure of the chaff set 21 elements of
The purpose of the non-invertible transformation is a creation of another layer of security in order to deny a potential attacher the plain text. A private encryption key Kpr may be used in order to further encrypt the result (T(F) in order to obtain a template 22 En=Kpr(T(F) E) may be further encoded into a template 22 of
A particular functional form of the non-invertible transformation may be kept secret and revealed only to a bona fide customer as a part of a Decoder. Here chaotic pattern is encrypted using a private key, should only be known to the manufacturer. The cryptographic part of encoding and decoding may use a widely known RSA approach but with an important modification. The use of the private and the public key may be inverted as compared with the classical RSA. The decryption, however uses public key, which is made available to customer. A multiplicative group based on the elliptic curves, well known to someone skilled in the art, may be used for better security for the same key size with El Gamal scheme is alternatively recommended. Moreover, before the feature set is digitized, the non invertible continuous transformation T is applied. The transformation result T(F), similarly to application of cancel-able biometrics, known to someone skilled in art, should be locally smooth, but globally not smooth, thus further protecting the template from possible attacks. This allows the match to be performed over the transformed representations without opening the template, thus making it more secure. The local smoothness property of the chosen non invertible transformation will make sure that the small measurement noise in the raw attributes domain will only cause small discrepancies in the transformed range should the taggant and the template contents match. Global non-smoothness on another hand, will turn the different values of the attributes into significant discrepancies in the transformed range if the taggant and the template contents do not match. Any point matching algorithm known to someone skilled in the art of Computer Vision will fit into the described matching framework.
The activation sequence performed by the LED array based activator 15 of
In a preferred embodiments, the present invention extends the described scheme with introduction of the error correction, chaffs, encoded LED activation sequence, and non-invertible transformation over attribute values which increases the template robustness, reliability, compactness and the security.
The aforementioned plurality of chaotic fluorescent entities (with their associated attributes) located on the product. All the attributes information gets encoded in a compact form as a template. Depending on the type an applicable lossless compression technique, known to someone skilled in art, should be chosen. It may include DC subtraction followed by any type of spatial decorrelation followed by an entropy encoding technique such as arithmetic or Hofman encoding. Using a selected and compressed feature set allows a more compact representation that may be small enough for bar code or even for a sequence of the symbols.
During the Decoding stage (see
Measurement of such physical attributes as spectrum, polarization degree, of each fluorescent entity comprising the taggant may be executed according to its definition given in [3] Chen et al. Estimation of time related dynamic characteristics of the said fluorescent entities may be performed according to [2], Chia et al. Both groups of the measurement are known to someone skilled in art.
Unlike the full representation of the image of the prior art described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,243,930 B2, only a transformed, compressed, complemented with error correction overhead added, taggant attributes are used. The attributes (spectrum, polarization, dynamic characteristics, relative locations) are random, their combination is unique, and but may be further compressed by an appropriate type of lossless compression. The attributes-features already require much less storage than full image in pre-compressed format, normally used in image based chaosmetrics. The compression will allow a compact representation of the chaotic information sufficiently small in order to be stored in the product item. Moreover attributes, extracted from the taggant 27,
The matching of the aforementioned collection of fluorescent attributes may be performed as a point matching directly on the transformed attributes values. A variation of point matching framework known as minutia matching to someone skilled in art of computer vision or fingerprint matching may be applied. The plurality of fluorescent points-entities along with their respective transformed attributes may be grouped in translation, rotation invariant groups pairs or triples shown in
A close match requires similar attribute values between the attributes 33a,b,c of
The second embodiment is a special case of the plurality of chaotic fluorescent entities which represents a product item “fingerprint” of the embodiment 1 with a 2D taggant. A 3D plastic transparent bubble with embedded florescent entities is its extension. A transparent mass with the inclusions is melted down, mixed with the aforementioned entities and embedded on a product as shown on of
The third embodiment is a special case of the embodiment 1, applied to the paper currency counterfeit detection. It comprises application of randomly located fibers, specks, particles, or other plurality fluorescent entities possessing a collection of fluorescent attribute of random values on a uniform portion of the banknote. The associated fluorescent attributes may be encoded following the first embodiment and placed on the currency note as a part of serial number as a sequence of symbols or a bar code. This information may be placed in which may be readable by currency processing machines. Activator comprising LED array controlled by an computing device. An existing cell phone hardware may be used to implement such an activator. Alternatively, an LED array may be integrated into a cash processing machine; The digital representation of the attributes may be stored in transformed, a compressed, encrypted, as a template 22 of
An improvement in chaosmetrics based counterfeiting method and apparatus increases security by utilization of the non-invertible privately available transformation over the raw features. In this case the match is performed directly on the transformed attributes T(F). This makes a crypto atack against the private key more difficult, since the raw features are never reveled in the digital format. LED based activator further extends the security due to privately available LED activation sequence. Plurality of fluorescent entities may be embedded in a product item in such a way so that the verification digital code placed on a modality different from the one where the features were placed in order to make the job of the counterfeiter more difficult, if not practically impossible. Thus the currency note will have its unique identity and which can be verifiable.
A marker comprises of several geometrical figures lines, rectangles 41, 41 of
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