Reading the Security Features of an ID Document

You review identity documents that applicants photograph with a phone or webcam, and you want to know which security features public guidance asks examiners to look for, and which tampering classes an automated check can reasonably cover from a photograph. This article answers that for a fraud analyst. It draws on the guidance the United Kingdom Home Office National Document Fraud Unit published for people who examine documents, and on the public register of authentic documents run by the Council of the European Union, and it adds a plainly labelled reading of what the camera can and cannot see.

Four ways a document is abused

The Home Office guidance separates four types of document abuse.

• Impersonation: the person is a look-alike presenting a genuine document.
• Counterfeits: a complete reproduction from scratch that resembles an officially issued document.
• Forgeries: a genuine document that has been unlawfully altered, for example by substituting a page, substituting a photograph or image, or altering the personal details.
• Pseudo or fantasy documents: documents that may look like a passport or identity card but are not officially recognised and are not acceptable proof of nationality or identity.

The distinction matters for tooling. A counterfeit fails on the features of the base material and printing. A forgery usually passes those and fails at the point of alteration. A fantasy document passes no register. Impersonation passes everything about the document and has to be caught by comparing the face with the portrait.

The features examiners are asked to look at

The guidance lists these features, each with the way to examine it.

• Base fluorescence under ultraviolet light: counterfeits often fluoresce more brightly than genuine documents, which use dull, secure paper or material.
• Watermarks: created during paper manufacture by varying the thickness of the paper, viewed with transmitted light, and showing subtle changes in tone, both lighter and darker areas. A watermark should never react under ultraviolet light.
• Random fibres: security fibres appear randomly across the paper, visible to the naked eye or reacting under ultraviolet light. The guidance gives an example of two pages of a counterfeit passport where fibres sit in identical positions, which cannot happen in genuine documents.
• Background print: printed to a high standard, with solid lines and detailed designs visible under magnification. Random dots are a characteristic of readily available home printers.
• Intaglio ink: a printing process that leaves a raised feel which can be felt by running a finger over the paper, found on the inside cover of most passports.
• Optically variable ink: designs that show a clear colour change when the document is tilted.
• Holographic devices: highly detailed, showing different colours and designs when rotated and tilted; a counterfeit may carry a generic hologram.
• The machine readable zone: only the characters of a defined font should appear in its lines, although some countries have issued genuine passports with a non-compliant font.
• Laser engraving on polycarbonate documents: the engraved portrait shows shades of grey or brown, while forgeries usually have printed images with jet black or coloured dots.

Equipment follows the features. The guidance names handheld magnifiers, ultraviolet light sources, transmitted light such as a lamp or torch, and document scanners, and warns that the equipment is effective only if the user understands secure documents and their security features.

How forgeries are made

The guidance walks through the common alterations. In a substituted page, the pages and cover of a stitched passport should all be in alignment, and re-assembly by hand makes it difficult for pages to sit flush. In a substituted photograph, most photographs and images are protected by an ink stamp, an emboss or a laminate with visible safeguards, an ink stamp is produced with wet ink and should not be printed, and a forger may print a new image onto a piece of paper placed under the laminate or onto a thin clear laminate placed over the page. Its examples show a replacement image visible as added paper in transmitted and ultraviolet light, and a replacement face added on a clear laminate. In altered details, a forger may abrade the original ink and write a new date of birth, and will often change details together with a page or photograph.

The accompanying checklists ask about damage around the photograph, safeguards over the image, evidence of a second laminate, damage to paper around the personal details, and whether the document is a fantasy document that cannot be found on the public registers.

What the public registers are for

The Council of the European Union runs PRADO, the public register of authentic travel and identity documents online. An archived case study published by the European Commission explains the background. PRADO provides information on security features of authentic documents to the general public, including governmental and non-governmental organisations, and the archived text names employers, postal services, banks, credit institutions, security companies, vehicle hire agencies and notaries as parties that need to check identity documents. Its pages are static, generated and updated daily from a restricted system, and are available in 22 official languages of the Union. A sister system with more detail on authentic and false documents is limited to competent national authorities.

The Home Office guidance points to PRADO and to a second register as places to look up images and information on genuine documents, and its checklist uses them to test whether a document is a fantasy document.

What a photograph can and cannot show

This section is our own reading, not a statement from the sources. It maps the features above to the kind of evidence a single photograph taken by an applicant can carry.

• Features that depend on touch cannot be present in a photograph. Raised intaglio printing is the example.
• Features that depend on ultraviolet or transmitted light cannot be observed in a photograph taken under ordinary light. Base fluorescence, watermark behaviour under ultraviolet light and fibre fluorescence fall here.
• Features that depend on tilt are visible only if the capture shows more than one angle, for optically variable ink and holograms.
• Features that depend on the look of print and layout can be assessed from a sharp, well-lit image: print quality, the font of the machine readable zone, alignment of elements, the consistency of printed data.
• Signs of editing of the image itself, such as pasted regions, can be assessed from the file, and signs of a screen, a copy or a printout can be assessed from the capture.

The practical conclusion for a fraud analyst is a division of labour. The camera supports checks on print, layout, consistency and image integrity, and the document-liveness requirement described in the companion article on automated validation addresses whether a physical document was present at all. Checks that need touch or special light belong to in-person examination or to documents whose chip or digital signature can be read.

How NeuroVision fits

NeuroVision's document anti-fraud step covers screen photos, photocopies, printouts, glued photos, drawn-on elements, erasures, edited images and logical data errors, and it is included in every package. The document recognition step reads printed and handwritten text and the machine readable zone with its checksum, and it carries signature and stamp checks.

To see these checks on sample documents, contact the team.

Sources

All sources were fetched on 27 October 2026.

• Guidance on examining identity documents, National Document Fraud Unit, Home Office, United Kingdom.
• PRADO: Do you have to check identity documents?, archived case study, Interoperable Europe Portal, European Commission.