Using data compression to enhance the security of identification document

Forging the special documents such as driver's license, visa and passport, has reached unprecedented level in recent years. In order to stop such crimes, various methods have been presented. One typical way is to do human identification if face picture is present in the documents. But it’s often found that criminals modify the face picture in the documents, thus card validation purely based on face picture may also not be reliable. In this paper we present a novel method for such document authentication problem, we propose to do face image compression and store the data as barcode in an identification document, both of the barcode and original photo are printed in the document. By comparing the face image scanned from the document and the picture reconstructed from barcode, using different image processing methods to enhance the image and Gabor wavelet features, we can make a decision whether the document is valid or not. Index Terms -- Image enhancement, Identification, Data compression, Matching.