Currency security and forensics: a survey

By its definition, the word currency refers to an agreed medium for exchange, a nation’s currency is the formal medium enforced by the elected governing entity. Throughout history, issuers have faced one common threat: counterfeiting. Despite technological advancements, overcoming counterfeit production remains a distant future. Scientific determination of authenticity requires a deep understanding of the raw materials and manufacturing processes involved. This survey serves as a synthesis of the current literature to understand the technology and the mechanics involved in currency manufacture and security, whilst identifying gaps in the current literature. Ultimately, a robust currency is desire

Central Banks and Payment Instruments: a Serious Case of Schizophrenia

This article analyses the competition between cash and payment cards against the backdrop of the dual role of central banks - as issuers of cash and as institutions with a mandate to foster the efficiency of payment systems in general. It is argued that this dual role results in a number of policy dilemmas, namely concerning pricing, traceability of banknotes and the choice of denominations of coins and banknotes. On a general level, the article argues that central banks should place greater emphasis on improving the efficiency of retail payments and less on protecting their self-interest. More concretely, the article repeats the suggestion - originally put forward in VAN HOVE & VUCHELEN (1996) - that the ECB should place the upper limit of its banknote series at EUR 50 instead of EUR 500. It is also argued that policy makers should explicitly foster the use of cost-based pricing and in particular create a legal environment that makes it possible for commercial banks to start using it.payment instruments; central banks; cash; banknotes; payment cards; public policy; efficiency

Does color modalities affect handwriting recognition? An empirical study on Persian handwritings using convolutional neural networks

Most of the methods on handwritten recognition in the literature are focused and evaluated on Black and White (BW) image databases. In this paper we try to answer a fundamental question in document recognition. Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), as eye simulator, we investigate to see whether color modalities of handwritten digits and words affect their recognition accuracy or speed? To the best of our knowledge, so far this question has not been answered due to the lack of handwritten databases that have all three color modalities of handwritings. To answer this question, we selected 13,330 isolated digits and 62,500 words from a novel Persian handwritten database, which have three different color modalities and are unique in term of size and variety. Our selected datasets are divided into training, validation, and testing sets. Afterwards, similar conventional CNN models are trained with the training samples. While the experimental results on the testing set show that CNN on the BW digit and word images has a higher performance compared to the other two color modalities, in general there are no significant differences for network accuracy in different color modalities. Also, comparisons of training times in three color modalities show that recognition of handwritten digits and words in BW images using CNN is much more efficient

Farmer producer companies : past, present and future

Eighty-seven percent of agricultural households in India are small and marginal producers, cultivating small plots which generate low returns. Their average monthly income is Rs 6426, making farming on small plots economically unviable (NSSO 2014). Therefore, policy makers and practitioners are turning to producer collectives as a means for improving the economic situation of small producers