Development of pharmaceutical counterfeit detector device using image processing method

Abstract

 Counterfeit drug is a major problem and has negatively impact on both individual and society. In general, it is hardly to identify the difference between real and counterfeit medicines. At present, the current precision equipment is expensive and not suitable for primary screening test. In this research, the production batch number, manufacturing date and expiry date were selected for the experiment since these texts had been printed from pharmaceutical manufacturer with specific pattern and could be identified by using image processing application on Android mobile devices. The results were precisely judged with Pearson’s correlation coefficient (r). From this experiment, the results showed that average r value of control group was 0.9997 while this average value in sample group was 0.9940. The different percentage of these two values from both groups was 0.57. Besides, the average r values from the test of 4 real pharmaceutical samples are 0.9997, 0.9994, 0.9991 and 0.9985, respectively.