Signal & Image Processing : An International Journal (SIPIJ) Vol.5, No.4, August 2014 DOI : 10.5121/sipij.2014.5404 37               Suman V Patgar 1 , Rani K 2 and Vasudev T 2 1 P.E.T Research Foundation, P.E.S College of Engineering, Mandya, India, 571401 2 Maharaja Research Foundation, Maharaja Institute of Technology Mysore, Belawadi, S.R Patna, Mandya, India, 571438 ABSTRACT Photocopy documents are very common in our normal life. People are permitted to carry and present photocopied documents to avoid damages to the original documents. But this provision is misused for temporary benefits by fabricating fake photocopied documents. Fabrication of fake photocopied document is possible only in 2 nd and higher order recursive order of photocopies. Whenever a photocopied document is submitted, it may be required to check its originality. When the document is 1 st order photocopy, chances of fabrication may be ignored. On the other hand when the photocopy order is 2 nd or above, probability of fabrication may be suspected. Hence when a photocopy document is presented, the recursive order number of photocopy is to be estimated to ascertain the originality. This requirement demands to investigate methods to estimate order number of photocopy. In this work, a voting based approach is used to detect the recursive order number of the photocopy document using probability distributions exponential, extreme values and lognormal distributions is proposed. A detailed experimentation is performed on a generated data set and the method exhibits efficiency close to 89%. KEYWORDS fabricated photocopy documents, recursive order number, probability distributions, voting. 1. INTRODUCTION Many authorities trust and accept the photocopied documents submitted by citizens as proof and consider the same as genuine. Few such applications like to open bank account, applying for gas connection, requesting for mobile sim card, concerned authorities insist photocopy documents like voter id, driving license, ration card, pan card and passport as proof of address, age, photo id etc to be submitted along with the application form. Certain class of people could exploit the trust of the authorities, and indulge in forging/ tampering/ fabricating photocopy document. These things would be deliberately made at the time of obtaining the photocopy of document without damaging the original document. It is learned that in majority of the cases fabrications are made by changing/ replacing/ overwriting/ removing/ adding contents in place of authenticated content.