Fighting against medicine packaging counterfeits: rotogravure press vs cylinder signatures

Abstract

The number of medicine counterfeits increases significantly. This problem affects not only expensive medicines, but also some low cost ones. In this paper, we study the characteristics of medicine packages printed using rotogravure printing on blister foils and propose an authentication system that identifies the equipment used for printing medicine foils. The rotogravure printing process uses an engraved cylinder and a rotogravure press. Each of these elements has its own signature that can be used for process identification and for packaging authentication. Using constructed database, we show that the signature of engraved cylinder impacts more on printed patterns in comparison with the signature of rotogravure press. The experiments done show that we can identify the cylinder used for the printing using a classical machine learning methods from a small number of training samples.