Preventing Wine Counterfeiting by Individual Cork Stopper Recognition Using Image Processing Technologies

Valter Costa,Armando Sousa,Ana Reis

doi:10.3390/jimaging4040054

Abstract

Wine counterfeiting is a major problem worldwide. Within this context, an approach to the problem of discerning original wine bottles from forged ones is the use of natural features present in the product, object and/or material (using it “as is”). The proposed application uses the cork stopper as a unique fingerprint, combined with state of the art image processing techniques to achieve individual object recognition and smartphones as the authentication equipment. The anti-counterfeiting scheme is divided into two phases: an enrollment phase, where every bottle is registered in a database using a photo of its cork stopper inside the bottle; and a verification phase, where an end-user/retailer captures a photo of the cork stopper using a regular smartphone, compares the photo with the previously-stored one and retrieves it if the wine bottle was previously registered. To evaluate the performance of the proposed application, two datasets of natural/agglomerate cork stoppers were built, totaling 1000 photos. The worst case results show a 100% precision ratio, an accuracy of 99.94% and a recall of 94.00%, using different smartphones. The perfect score in precision is a promising result, proving that this system can be applied to the prevention of wine counterfeiting and consumer/retailer security when purchasing a wine bottle.

Highlights

One major problem that modern society faces today is counterfeiting, reaching a global scale.The search for solutions to combat and prevent this issue is nothing recent, and the search for user-friendly low-cost solutions is growing
Some technologies have been proposed in the literature and applied in industrial domains to prevent wine and spirit counterfeiting, such as RFIDs, NFCs, QR codes, barcodes, digital water marking, labels, holograms, tags, among others, and some companies are specialized in the development of new and hybrid strategies to make wine counterfeiting difficult
A wine anti-counterfeiting scheme based on natural features/patterns of cork stoppers combined with image processing techniques was proposed in this article

Summary

Introduction

One major problem that modern society faces today is counterfeiting, reaching a global scale.The search for solutions to combat and prevent this issue is nothing recent, and the search for user-friendly low-cost solutions is growing. Within this context, some technologies have been proposed in the literature and applied in industrial domains to prevent wine and spirit counterfeiting, such as RFIDs, NFCs, QR codes, barcodes, digital water marking, labels, holograms, tags, among others, and some companies are specialized in the development of new and hybrid strategies to make wine counterfeiting difficult. A common idea behind these approaches is the need to add a defining trait or symbol, usually in the package, to improve the consumer safety and increase the difficulty to counterfeit, while providing serialization for each bottle of wine.

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Discussion

Conclusion