Print biometrics: Recovering forensic signatures from halftone images

High-resolution imaging is useful for the forensic identification of unique printed regions. In this paper, we adapt an iris biometric approach to provide significant statistical discrimination between any two imaged halftone areas. The method is based on image registration followed by 2D Gabor wavelet encoding. Hamming Distances (HD) are used for matching. The z-scores for the comparison of like and unlike samples indicate improved identification statistics compared to both iris biometrics and previous methods of print authentication.