Cross-platform application for protection of a wide range of products from counterfeiting

The article describes an application developed to protect a wide range of products from counterfeiting. Protection is achieved by encoding and identifying polymeric films used for product packaging and containing coding el-ements (luminophores randomly introduced into the films during their production). Encoding is the formation of an electronic digital signature of the package by processing its digital image. A digital signature is a reference if it is generated by the film manufacturer. Identification consists of checking the coincidence of the digital signature of the package generated by the consumer of the product with the reference signature and determining the authenticity or counterfeit of the package. The key feature of the application is its cross-platform nature, which allows using a single code base compiled for various software and hardware platforms. The application is a software package with a client-server architecture, adjustable to various types of packages, working on computers running Windows, Linux operating systems and mobile devices running Android, iOS operating systems. The server subsystem includes a database of packages, user devices and reference digital signatures, encoding and identification modules. They implement a method for estimating the angles of triangles constructed based on the brightest points on a film photograph (during processing of which the distortion and tilt angle of the device camera are taken into account), and a method for estimating the times of luminophore glow decay to specified levels based on a video recording of the glow obtained after excitation of luminescence. The methods are selected depending on the type of package, requirements for the accuracy and time of encoding and identification. Testing the application on examples of industrial samples of packaging films based on polyvinyl chloride with various luminophores using smartphones of different models has confirmed its operability. Using the application allows us to reduce the volume of counterfeit products and the costs of implementing protection, significantly expand the audience of users and increase their level of trust in the protection system due to the use of the users’ own devices, to which minimal requirements are imposed.