Application of Adobe® Photoshop® CC 2018 for Identifying the Source of HP® Color Laser Printouts
Ahmad Saed Salim, Asmaa A. Abdalla · Arab Journal of Forensic Sciences and Forensic Medicine · 2019
In today’s digital world, printer forensics is one of themost important disciplines to reveal the authenticity of printeddocuments and track criminals. Digital steganographyis an advanced approach to secure color laser printing processes,but it cannot be applied to monochrome laser printers.Therefore, the identity of the machine used to print colorquestioned documents provides a valuable means for detectingforgery crimes in digital forensic labs and law enforcementagencies. Based on this, we introduced a new forensicmethod that unveils the steganography (hidden information)embedded in color laser printouts via an adopted preset inAdobe® Photoshop® CC 2018. This forensic tool can be appliedas a nondestructive and indirect tool for image processing.In the present work, printing, scanning, extraction, andmeasurements for the embedded tracking dots of candidatecolor laser printouts were conducted.Thirty-five HP® color laser printers were selected withdifferent and same models with different serial numbers andused to print a hundred color laser printouts.The defined coded dots matrix patterns that characterizedthe color laser machines of the HP® brand could clearly bedetermined.Therefore, this procedure could successfully be appliedto distinguish between various color laser printouts printedby HP® printers with a variant serial number in digital forensiclabs with a conclusive accuracy ratio attained to onehundred percent.