Inkjet-printed unclonable quantum dot fluorescent anti-counterfeiting labels with artificial intelligence authentication

By Yang Liu, Fei Han, Fushan Li, Yan Zhao, Maosheng Chen, Zhongwei Xu, Xin Zheng, Hailong Hu, Jian-min Yao, T. Guo and 6 more. Nature Communications, 2019

447 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An ideal anti-counterfeiting technique has to be inexpensive, mass-producible, nondestructive, unclonable and convenient for authentication. Although many anti-counterfeiting technologies have been developed, very few of them fulfill all the above requirements. Here we report a non-destructive, inkjet-printable, artificial intelligence (AI)-decodable and unclonable security label. The stochastic pinning points at the three-phase contact line of the ink droplets is crucial for the successful inkjet printing of the unclonable security labels. Upon the solvent evaporation, the three-phase contact lines are pinned around the pinning points, where the quantum dots in the ink droplets deposited on, forming physically unclonable flower-like patterns. By utilizing the RGB emission quantum dots, full-color fluorescence security labels can be produced. A convenient and reliable AI-based authentication strategy is developed, allowing for the fast authentication of the covert, unclonable flower-like dot patterns with different sharpness, brightness, rotations, amplifications and the mixture of these parameters. Anti-counterfeiting technologies should ideally be unclonable, yet simple to fabricate and decode. Here, the authors develop an inkjet-printable and unclonable security label based on random patterning of quantum dot inks, and accompany it with an artificial intelligence decoding mechanism capable of authenticating the patterns.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be369e2738b10595f567957d9cc20a9df4b7de95