A Watermarking Technique to Secure Printed Matrix Barcode—Application for Anti-Counterfeit Packaging

Counterfeiting of consumer goods is a critical problem which causes various negative impacts for consumers, enterprises and the whole economic ecosystem. Anti-counterfeit labels and packaging is one of the main solutions to help enterprises protect their brand against this concern. In this paper, we introduced a novel watermarking technique, which embeds a particular random micro-texture into a matrix barcode and transforms this one into a security layer for making packaging anti-counterfeited. The secured matrix barcode is hard to be reproduced by counterfeiters. In fact, any degradations caused by the counterfeiting process will change the statistical behaviors of the embedded micro-texture. Statistical detectors based on the hypothesis testing framework are also introduced to classify authentic and counterfeited printed barcodes. Experimental results confirm the usability and the effectiveness of the proposed anti-counterfeiting solution.