Physical document verification in uncontrolled environments

A method for localizing an image, the method comprising:

• providing a plurality of physical document images and a plurality of background images, wherein each of the plurality of physical document images includes a physical document and each of the plurality of background images includes a background absent a physical document;
• selecting one or more subsets including the plurality of physical document images and the plurality of background images;
• for each of the subsets:
• generating a simulated image using the physical document images and the background images;
• providing the simulated images to a fully convolutional neural network with binary masks for the corresponding set of physical document images and background images as inputs to train the fully convolutional neural network;
• and
• training the fully convolutional network to recognize a portion of the simulated image that includes the physical document image and a portion of the simulated image that includes the background image as expected outputs of processing the simulated image;
• wherein the fully convolutional neural network runs on at least one server machine having at least one processor and at least one non-transitory computer readable medium.

A system, comprising:

• a computing device coupled to a network, the computing device including a processing device, the processing device configured to execute instructions to:
• in response to receiving an image of a physical document to be authenticated, the image including the physical document and a background, produce a pre-processed image, the pre-processed image including the physical document separated from the background, including:
• separating the physical document from the background by semantic segmentation, the semantic segmentation utilizing an artificial neural network trained using an augmented dataset generated by applying geometric transformations over different backgrounds;
• and
• one or more of:
• a corner detection analysis and a brightness analysis;
• extract features of the pre-processed image to determine a document type of the physical document, wherein the features are defined based on the document type;
• in response to determining the document type of the physical document, verify whether the physical document is authentic based on the extracted features relative to expected features for the corresponding document type, the verifying utilizing a machine learning classifier;
• and
• generate an indication of whether the physical document is authentic based on the verifying.