Counterfeiting affects diverse industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, and food, posing serious health and economic risks. Printable unclonable codes, such as Copy Detection Patterns (CDPs), are widely used as an anti-counterfeiting measure and are applied to products and packaging. However, the increasing availability of high-resolution printing and scanning devices, along with advances in generative deep learning, undermines traditional authentication systems, which often fail to distinguish high-quality counterfeits from genuine prints. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based authentication framework that jointly leverages the original binary template, the printed CDP, and a representation of printer identity that captures relevant semantic information. Formulating authentication as multi-class printer classification over printer signatures lets our model capture fine-grained, device-specific features via spatial and textual conditioning. We extend ControlNet by repurposing the denoising process for class-conditioned noise prediction, enabling effective printer classification. On the Indigo 1 x 1 Base dataset, our method outperforms traditional similarity metrics and prior deep learning approaches. Results show the framework generalises to counterfeit types unseen during training.
@article{arxiv.2603.08998,
title = {Diffusion-Based Authentication of Copy Detection Patterns: A Multimodal Framework with Printer Signature Conditioning},
author = {Bolutife Atoki and Iuliia Tkachenko and Bertrand Kerautret and Carlos Crispim-Junior},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.08998},
year = {2026}
}