What security features (UV, IR, holograms) can be checked during scanning?

Modern identity documents include a range of physical security features specifically designed to be difficult to replicate outside official government printing facilities, and checking these features under different lighting conditions is a meaningful part of document authenticity verification, distinct from simply extracting and cross-checking the printed data.

UV (ultraviolet) light reveals features that are invisible under normal lighting but fluoresce or become visible when illuminated with UV light, specific patterns, printed elements, or fibers embedded in the document's paper or laminate that are designed specifically as a hidden security layer. A genuine document will show the expected UV response for its type.

A forgery attempting to replicate the visible design without access to the specialized materials or printing processes used for the genuine UV elements often fails to reproduce this correctly, or lacks it entirely.

IR (infrared) light reveals a different category of features, sometimes used to check for overprinting or to detect certain security inks that behave differently under infrared than under visible light. This can help distinguish genuine printing techniques from attempts to reproduce a document's appearance using standard printers or photocopying, which typically don't replicate the specific ink behaviors that specialized document printing does.

Holograms and other optically variable elements, features that shift appearance, color, or visible pattern depending on the viewing angle, are difficult to reproduce convincingly, particularly in a static image, since a photograph or photocopy can only capture the appearance from one fixed angle rather than the dynamic shift that's characteristic of a genuine hologram. Checking these properly generally requires either specialized capture equipment designed to illuminate a document under multiple light sources, or, in mobile scanning scenarios, guided capture that asks a user to slightly tilt the document during scanning so the software can observe whether the expected optical shift actually occurs.

These checks generally require either dedicated hardware (multi-light-source scanners, common in higher-security settings like border control or banking branches) or software specifically designed to work with a standard camera's capabilities, which has more limited but still meaningful ability to detect certain optical security features through guided multi-angle capture.

ScanDoc's document authenticity checks focus primarily on data consistency, liveness detection, and OCR-based security signals achievable through standard camera-based scanning, and businesses requiring dedicated multi-light-source physical security analysis (UV, IR) alongside ScanDoc's software-based checks should confirm with ScanDoc directly which specific hardware integrations support this deeper level of physical security verification.