Koenig & Bauer (K&B) has set up a five-year endowed chair at the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences. Helene Dörksen has been appointed to the chair with effect from 1 August 2019. The goal of the endowed chair is to promote development and research in the field of document authentication and classification.
The chair and its laboratory are to be hosted by the ‘Mathematics and Authentication’ section within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This interdisciplinary field embracing mathematics, algorithmic, biophotonics and chemical analysis is a future-oriented field of research. It focuses on the analysis of documents of all types including security documents and banknotes. It will also analyze critical packaging, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, and other physical objects that require authentication at given points along the value chain. Studies of the implementation technologies, such as embedded and mobile systems, and their usability are also supported by the field of research.
Claus Bolza-Schünemann, president and chief executive officer, K&B, said, “The endowed chair was a logical next step, and appropriate recognition for the academic achievements of our university partner. For several years now, we have been developing key image analysis technologies for the group in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region, together with specialists from the university. K&B has been a motor of the traditional German printing industry for over 200 years, driving progress in the branch with a long list of innovative developments, also in the field of optical inspection.”
The K&B facility in Ostwestfalen-Lippe is a center for image processing technology and has been developing and supporting corresponding systems for K&B since 2001. While earlier systems were geared to the needs of banknote production, the developments today provide equally for wide-ranging commercial applications in packaging and metal decoration.
The research projects at inIT have developed new security technologies, covering both the security features and verification. In 2017, this research spawned a start-up, Coverno GmbH, at the Centrum Industrial IT, one of the largest science-to-business centers for smart automation, in Lemgo.
