Authentication of rotogravure print-outs using a regular test pattern

International audienceThe medicine falsification is an important problem nowadays which represents a real danger for human lives. Therefore, it is important to find a cheap and efficient solution that can be used for all kinds of medicines. In this paper, we explore the domain of pharmaceutical packaging printed on blister foils using rotogravure process. It was shown that the chemical etching has a stochastic nature that can be spotted by correlation or classical machine learning methods. We propose an authentication system that uses a novel regular test pattern for authentication of blister foils. Thanks to this regular test pattern we can identify the cylinder used for printing and the position of the regular test pattern engraved on the authentic cylinder, as well as easily reject the fake patterns printed using counterfeiter cylinder and rotogravure press. The proposed identification/authentication system cannot be easily attacked as it is not possible to imitate the signature of chemical etching process. Additionally, we will shortly discussed the possibility to enlarge the proposed system to another types of engraving processes and formulate some future paths for this work