Colour laser printer identification using halftone texture fingerprint

Numerous forgeries are made by precise and fast colour laser printers, and they have the ability to cause severe harm to society. To prevent such forgeries, printer identification can be employed as a countermeasure. A new method is presented to identify colour laser printers using halftone texture fingerprints. The method uses images photographed without an additional close-up lens as input images, and halftone texture fingerprints are extracted in the curvelet transform domain. The extracted halftone texture fingerprint is used in correlation-based detection, and the colour laser printer of the most similar known halftone texture fingerprint is determined as the source colour laser printer. Experiments are performed on five colour laser printers and the performance is compared with existing methods. Experimental results show that the method overcomes the limitations of existing methods.