Dr. Justin Picard of Scantrust

With the advancements in smartphone capabilities, digital anti-counterfeiting technologies such as copy detection patterns and surface fingerprints are replacing  traditional solutions (e.g. holograms, security inks). These digital authentication techniques have numerous advantages: they provide intrinsic security, rely on existing production processes, and authentication can potentially be performed by anyone with a smartphone.    However, pushing the boundaries in terms of security and ease of verification  raises a number of challenges, which are best addressed by  machine learning and deep learning techniques.  

Biography:

Dr. Justin Picard (a Senior Member of IEEE) is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Scantrust, a leading anti-counterfeiting and traceability software company.  Dr. Picard is the inventor of the copy detection pattern, a digital authentication technology for detecting product and document counterfeiting. Copy detection patterns are used to protect billions of products each year, and are a topic of active research within the IEEE Signal Processing Information Forensics and Security community. Dr. Picard attended Polytechnique Montréal, where he received his B.S. degree in physics  engineering (1990-1994), and his MSc in electronics engineering (1994-1997). He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Neuchâtel (1996-2000), before attending the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for postdoctoral research in digital watermarking (2000-2001). Dr. Picard was a research and development engineer at Mediasec Technologies in Rhode Island (2001-2004), the head of research and development at Thomson Technicolor in Germany (2004-2006), and later the chief scientist at Advanced Track & Trace in France (2006-2013). In 2014, he co-founded Scantrust in Switzerland, after filing a patent on a QR Code which secures against counterfeit attempts. He was chief executive officer of the company until 2017,  then took the role of Chief Technology Officer. 

Dr. Picard is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade (2012-), and a member  of the network of experts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (2016-). He was selected as World Economic Forum Technology (WEF) Pioneer (2009), and served as a member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade (2009-2014). He is a member of the GS1 Digital Link technical committee, and an advisor to the European Union Intellectual Property Organization (EUIPO) on anti-counterfeiting technologies. He is also a co-founder of the non-governmental organization Black Market Watch, where he developed a methodology to assess the impacts of illicit trade. Dr. Picard has more than 25 patents and patent applications related to anti-counterfeiting technologies, secure traceability of documents and products, and digital  image and video watermarking.

Dr. Picard  was co-organizer of the  special session on “Forensics and Security of Physical Objects” at the 2021 IEEE Workshop on  Information Forensics and Security (WIFS). He is a reviewer for WIFS, and is on the program committee of the ACM Symposium on document engineering. Dr. Picard’s lecture topics include signal processing techniques for authentication and security of physical objects, image processing techniques for product authentication with smartphones, and counterfeit detection using machine learning and deep learning.

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