speckle pattern represents how partially coherent light from
the LED gets scattered through the rough surface and the
underlying microscopic structures of the region of the paper
focused on.
These texture speckle patterns generated from a simple
microscope with an inbuilt LED light source makes an excellent choice for a paper fingerprint due to a variety of factors. First, as shown in prior work on laser speckles [3],
speckle patterns generated from lasers are tamperproof even
if paper is soaked in water, crumpled, aff?ected by aging etc.
the chances that the microscopic structure gets a?ected
are small. As we show in this paper, the fingerprint generated from texture speckle patterns from partially coherent light source is suffi?cient to achieve the same objectives.
Second, generating these texture speckle patterns is cheap
(when compared to laser speckles), and is easy to use which
make them a great choice for developing regions. Third, extracting just the ber structure of the paper at a relative
macroscopic level with a small zoom might be susceptible
to cloning by the adversary. While the eld of view of our
microscopes are about 0.5mm (or much smaller based on the
magnification) in diameter, fiber fingerprinting uses a much
larger region of about 2.5 cm x 2.5 cm.