Forgery Detection and Value Identification of Euro Banknotes

This paper describes both hardware and software components to detectcounterfeits of Euro banknotes. The proposed system is also able to recognize the banknotevalues. Differently than other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach makes useof banknote images acquired with a near infrared camera to perform recognition andauthentication. This allows one to build a system that can effectively deal with realforgeries, which are usually not detectable with visible light. The hardware does not useany mechanical parts, so the overall system is low-cost. The proposed solution is reliablefor ambient light and banknote positioning. Users should simply lean the banknote to beanalyzed on a flat glass, and the system detects forgery, as well as recognizes the banknotevalue. The effectiveness of the proposed solution has been properly tested on a datasetcomposed by genuine and fake Euro banknotes provided by Italy’s central bank.