The issue of counterfeit currency has been bothering the Indian government in recent years as it not only affects the business transactions but also affects day-to-day transactions at the consumer level. A recent RBI survey estimates Rs 169,000 crore worth of counterfeit currency floating in the market. While machines are available now in market to identify such counterfeit currency, the availability of such machines is restricted to banks and big industrial houses. The consumer has no access to such mechanisms.

Neha N of Vidya Vikas Institute of Engineering & Technology, Mysore has precisely addressed this issue with her innovative and prize winning solution to identify counterfeit currency using cell phone.

The solution designed by Neha makes use of UV-visible and an optical near infrared point light sources, low power sensor chip, and the existing cell phone processor for detecting and notifying the user about counterfeit currency. This scheme makes cell phone, when in detection mode, an intelligent sensor. It also utilizes other architectural features of cell phone such as battery, display, and audio unit for the cited purpose.

The user is notified via phone display unit as well as the speaker. The scheme does not disturb any of the normal cell phone applications and adapts to the optimized energy saving algorithms such as adaptive sampling and lossless data compression. Such high adaptability makes the scheme consume negligible power from the phone battery for processing sensor signals.

The concepts of Image Processing, Signal Processing and Pattern Recognition are used for checking genuineness of currency as per RBI standards.

Moreover, since the proposed scheme works on phone battery and uses low power consumption techniques for processing, approximately 45% of energy can be saved when compared with the currently available stand alone counterfeit detection units which mostly work on AC supply.

Neha’s innovation came into light through the Innovation Challenge program organized by Schneider Electric India. Neha’s whitepaper on “Cell Phone based intelligent counterfeit teller” won the first prize among 150 teams who had participated in the contest. The participants were evaluated on the basis of quality of innovation, technical feasibility of solution, alignment to the contest theme and the proof of concept given.