ODDS 2025 – Secure Documents at the Crossroads of Optical and Digital Innovation

Warsaw, Poland, played host to the Optical & Digital Document Security™ (ODDS) 2025 conference from 15–17 September. The event confirmed once again that ODDS is the world’s leading forum (some would argue only forum) for the science and technology of secure documents.

More than just a conference, ODDS has become the meeting point for the people who shape the future of identity protection, banknote design, and digital credentials.

Pre-Conference Seminars

As is typical for ODDS conferences, the Warsaw programme opened with in-depth seminars that framed the debates to come.

The first session, led by Europol, examined the new threats from counterfeiting, tracing how organised criminal groups exploit weaknesses in document design and distribution. It highlighted the growing links between traditional counterfeiting and cyber-enabled fraud, and the increasingly internationalised enforcement response.

From enforcement to technology, the next seminar turned to optically variable features. Organised by IOTA, this discussion looked at the previous and next generations of holograms, micro-optics, and colour-shifting technologies. The seminar leader, IOTA Chairman, Dr Mark Deakes, emphasised that while optical effects remain powerful tools for first-line authentication, their survival depends on integration with digital verification.

The day concluded with a forward-looking session on the European Digital Identity Wallet, co-led by Franziska Granc (Nimbus) and Jörg Fischer (Bundesdruckerei). With eIDAS 2.0 mandating wallet availability across the EU, this seminar traced the technical, legal, and user experience challenges in rolling out secure digital identity at scale. Pilot programmes across Europe are now showing what seamless and secure interaction could look like in practice.

Together, these seminars underscored the breadth of forces shaping secure documents — from crime and regulation to design and technology.

The ODDS 2025 conference began with a reminder of why secure documents matter. The keynote address described passports, banknotes, and identity cards as ‘genius’ — because they combine science, design, and digital architecture into a single artefact that protects identity, enables commerce and safeguards trust.

Algorithms, AI and identity binding

The digital strand of ODDS 2025 reflected both opportunity and vulnerability.

NANOSILIKHAN introduced an electrically controlled reflective film — the so-called ‘e-Skin Glitter’. By changing both gloss and colour, this battery-free technology can display dynamic serialised information, bridging the worlds of optical variable devices and digital identifiers.

Orell Füssli and Scantrust presented Jaguar, a digital security feature based on copy detection patterns. Printed with standard offset inks, Jaguar can be verified by a simple smartphone scan. Already tested in banknotes, the principle could extend to ID cards and licences, making authentication accessible to the public without special equipment.

Artificial intelligence featured prominently. Researchers from inIT, Germany demonstrated how adversarial attacks can trick convolutional neural networks into misclassifying counterfeit IDs as genuine. Their case study was a stark reminder that AI models, however accurate in training, remain vulnerable to subtle manipulations — some transferable from digital design to physical print.

Not all AI news was adversarial. Ernesto González Candela and Jane Raymond presented PerceptNote®, a predictive tool that models how human users perceive and authenticate banknotes. By combining neuroscience with advanced image capture, PerceptNote allows designers to evaluate security features digitally — without the cost and delay of human trials.

FaceTec showcased its UR Code protocol — cryptographically signed biometric barcodes in a QR-like format. By embedding compressed face data with digital signatures, UR Codes allow credentials to bind securely to their holders. Scalable, privacy-preserving and affordable to deploy, they offer a ‘phygital’ identity layer suitable for both physical and mobile IDs.

Community, debate and openness

As always, ODDS was not just about presentations but about debate. Panel discussions explored whether optical features should be made more digital-friendly, how to secure AI against adversarial exploitation, and how to balance privacy with usability in identity wallets.

In particular, the panel on  ‘Should Optical Security Devices be More Digital Friendly?’  discussed whether the pursuit of digital compatibility risks diluting what makes optical security effective in the first place. Chaired by Francis Tuffy, the panel featured Ian Lancaster (former ODDS Chairman), Tony Poole (of the Document Security Alliance), Geoff Slagle (FaceTec) and Volker Lohweg (inIT), who debate among one another and with the audience on whether optical features should prioritise compatibility with digital tools or focus on their unique strengths of visual impact, durability, and resistance to simulation.

The conclusion, such as it was, came down in favour of optical features focusing on their own strengths, as should digital features, rather than trying to be something they are not.  

The atmosphere was frank and collaborative.

This sense of trust, where competitors, issuers, and researchers openly exchange insights, remains one of ODDS’s unique strengths.

ODDS carries a distinguished history. From its roots in the van Renesse Optical Security & Counterfeit Deterrence Techniques meetings of the 1990s, through the Optical Document Security conferences of the 2000s, the event evolved into ODDS in 2022 to reflect the interplay of optical and digital.

ODDS 2025 marked the fourth ODDS under this format — and the first fully under the leadership of Francis Tuffy, who took over as Programme Director after Ian Lancaster became Chairman Emeritus in 2024. It proved once again that this is the birthplace of innovations that become global standards. From holograms to biometrics, from diffractive foils to digital wallets, technologies launched at ODDS have reshaped the way the world authenticates value and identity.