Data-Driven Feature Characterization Techniques for Laser Printer Attribution

Laser printer attribution is an increasing problem with several applications, such as pointing out the ownership of crime proofs and authentication of printed documents. However, as commonly proposed methods for this task are based on custom-tailored features, they are limited by modeling assumptions about printing artifacts. In this paper, we explore solutions able to learn discriminant-printing patterns directly from the available data during an investigation, without any further feature engineering, proposing the first approach based on deep learning to laser printer attribution. This allows us to avoid any prior assumption about printing artifacts that characterize each printer, thus highlighting almost invisible and difficult printer footprints generated during the printing process. The proposed approach merges, in a synergistic fashion, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) applied on multiple representations of multiple data. Multiple representations, generated through different pre-processing operations, enable the use of the small and lightweight CNNs whilst the use of multiple data enable the use of aggregation procedures to better determine the provenance of a document. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to noisy data and outperforms existing counterparts in the literature for this problem.