Printer source identification of quick response codes using residual attention network and smartphones

Quick response codes are widely utilized in commodity anti-counterfeiting, and their traceability via smartphones is an effective authentication method. However, quick response codes are susceptible to illegal duplication, and the images captured by smartphones are easily affected by changes in light and environmental noise, leading to unsatisfactory verification results. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach by combining the squeeze-excitation attention module with bottleneck residual block. It presents a squeezeexcitation bottleneck residual network for printer source identification of quick response codes. The squeezeexcitation attention module pays more attention to the features that represent the printer attributes, reduces the interference of useless information, and has low computational consumption; while the bottleneck residual block has the advantages of few parameters, strong feature extraction capability, and good expandability. Thus, the performance can be improved effectively only with a small increasing in parameters. The experimental results verify that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 98.77% under smartphone capture conditions, it outperforms other convolutional neural network-based methods in terms of identification accuracy. The deep learning model proposed in this paper can be generalized and applied to the printer source identification of paper content in the civil, criminal investigation and judicial fields.