Sharad Joshi

Sharad Joshi, Suraj Saxena, Nitin Khanna

Vast volumes of printed documents continue to be used for various important as well as trivial applications. Such applications often rely on the information provided in the form of printed text documents whose integrity verification poses a challenge due to time constraints and lack of resources. Source printer identification provides essential information about the origin and integrity of a printed document in a fast and cost-effective manner. Even when fraudulent documents are identified, information about their origin can help stop future frauds. If a smartphone camera replaces scanner for the document acquisition process, document forensics would be more economical, user-friendly, and even faster in many applications where remote and distributed analysis is beneficial. Building on existing methods, we propose to learn a single CNN model from the fusion of letter images and their printer-specific noise residuals. In the absence of any publicly available dataset, we created a new dataset consisting of 2250 document images of text documents printed by eighteen printers and acquired by a smartphone camera at five acquisition settings. The proposed method achieves 98.42% document classification accuracy using images of letter 'e' under a 5x2 cross-validation approach. Further, when tested using about half a million letters of all types, it achieves 90.33% and 98.01% letter and document classification accuracies, respectively, thus highlighting the ability to learn a discriminative model without dependence on a single letter type. Also, classification accuracies are encouraging under various acquisition settings, including low illumination and change in angle between the document and camera planes.

Sharad Joshi, Suraj Saxena, Nitin Khanna

Knowledge of source smartphone corresponding to a document image can be helpful in a variety of applications including copyright infringement, ownership attribution, leak identification and usage restriction. In this letter, we investigate a convolutional neural network-based approach to solve source smartphone identification problem for printed text documents which have been captured by smartphone cameras and shared over messaging platform. In absence of any publicly available dataset addressing this problem, we introduce a new image dataset consisting of 315 images of documents printed in three different fonts, captured using 21 smartphones and shared over WhatsApp. Experiments conducted on this dataset demonstrate that, in all scenarios, the proposed system performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art system based on handcrafted features and classification of letters extracted from document images. The new dataset and code of the proposed system will be made publicly available along with this letter's publication, presently they are submitted for review.

Sharad Joshi, Nitin Khanna

An important aspect of examining printed documents for potential forgeries and copyright infringement is the identification of source printer as it can be helpful for ascertaining the leak and detecting forged documents. This paper proposes a system for classification of source printer from scanned images of printed documents using all the printed letters simultaneously. This system uses local texture patterns based features and a single classifier for classifying all the printed letters. Letters are extracted from scanned images using connected component analysis followed by morphological filtering without the need of using an OCR. Each letter is sub-divided into a flat region and an edge region, and local tetra patterns are estimated separately for these two regions. A strategically constructed pooling technique is used to extract the final feature vectors. The proposed method has been tested on both a publicly available dataset of 10 printers and a new dataset of 18 printers scanned at a resolution of 600 dpi as well as 300 dpi printed in four different fonts. The results indicate shape independence property in the proposed method as using a single classifier it outperforms existing handcrafted feature-based methods and needs much smaller number of training pages by using all the printed letters.