Automated production of batched unclonable micro-patterns anti-counterfeiting labels with strong robustness and rapid recognition speed

Anti-counterfeiting technologies are indeed crucial for information security and protecting product authenticity. Traditional anti-counterfeiting methods have their limitations due to their clonable nature. Exploring new technologies, particularly those based on pixel-level textures, is a promising avenue to address the clonable issue due to high encoding capacity. However, research in this field is still in its early stages. This work introduces a new fluorescent anti-counterfeiting label technology with four key characteristics: efficient laser etching, high-throughput fabrication and segmentation, robustness aided by data augmentation, and an exceptionally high recognition speed. Specifically, the etching achieves a speed of 1,200 labels/3s, the high-throughput procedures yield a rate of 2,400 labels/4 min, and the total count is about 5.2 × 104 labels. The number of labels is further augmented to about 5.2 × 106 by implementing arbitrary rotation and brightness variation to enhance the robustness in the recognition procedure. We divide these labels into 44 categories based on differences in patterns. Utilizing machine learning methods, we have achieved a total recognition (including extraction and search process) time per label averaging 421.96 ms without classification, and 40.13 ms with classification. Specifically, the search process with classification is nearly fiftieth times shorter than the non-classification method, reaching 8.52 ms in average. The overall recognition time is much faster than previous works, and achieves an accuracy of over 98.7%. This work significantly increases the practical significance of pixel-level anti-counterfeiting labels.