Color Feature Based Approach for Determining Ink Age in Printed Documents

Answering to a query like when a particular document was printed is quite helpful in practice especially forensic purposes. This study attempts to develop a general framework that makes use of image processing and pattern recognition principles for ink age determination in printed documents. The approach, at first, computationally extracts a set of suitable color features and then analyzes them to properly associate them with ink age. Finally, a neural net is designed and trained to determine ages of unknown samples. The dataset used for the present experiment consists of the cover pages of LIFE magazines published in between 1930´s and 70´s (five decades). Test results show that a viable framework for involving machines in assisting human experts for determining age of printed documents.