Electrophotographic printer identification by halftone texture analysis

Estimating printing source is applicable in many forensic situations. In this paper, we propose an electrophotographic printer identification scheme from its printed material, in which imperceptible halftone patterns are contained inherently. The halftone textures in each channel of CMYK domain are analyzed. We construct a histogram from angle values of linear features extracted by Hough transform. By averaging the histograms from multiple images, a printer´s reference pattern is identified. The source printer is determined by a maximum correlation value between the reference patterns and the histogram of given image. Experiments are performed on 9,000 images made by 9 printers. The result supports that the presented scheme clearly recognizes different halftone textures.