Secured laser printing of color images in identity documents – SLICID

In a society where identity theft is a criminogenic phenomenon that threatens all sectors of activity, with considerable economic impact, people identification is of great importance. The objective of this project is to develop innovative secure printing solutions for visual authentication of physical ID documents to prevent their counterfeiting and forgery. SLICID aims at developing a competitive solution based on a combination of academic and industrial expertise. This solution is based on the elaboration of a specific wrinkled multilayer stack of inorganic materials inserted inside the ID document. The functionalities of this stack will be to provide highly contrasted and angle-controlled colors after laser processing. SLICID relies on different breakthroughs and innovations: (1) laser texturing of an inorganic multilayer on a PC sheet to get specific scattering patterns; (2) obtaining highly saturated colors, written by laser, from embedded metallic nanoparticles in an optical interference coating; (3) laser printing of multiplexed images to display different images independently in the different scattering directions; (4) elaboration of numerical tools to simulate the electromagnetic response of nonplanar disordered ensembles of nanoparticles in nonplanar layered environments. The proposed technology allows complete customization that will define a new level of security for ID documents. To reach this goal, SLICID gathers academics and companies with complementary expertise. It will benefit from the know-how and expertise of LabHC in color management, laser-matter interaction, plasmonics and image processing, of HID in card elaboration, laser processing and security documents, of Institut Fresnel in laser processing, multiphysical modeling and scattering measurements, of ILM in electromagnetic modeling and color rendering, and of IREIS in thin film deposition and simulations for optical applications.