AN IDENTITY-CARD with a unique individual citizen code could be of immense usefor security purposes especially inchecking border infiltration and impersonation, as also during elections. Withthese specifications in mind, securitysystems specialists at the Bombay-basedBhabha Atomic Research Centre havedesigned a cost-effective computer laser1-card printing system for issuing multipurpose 1-cards.
The primary emphasis in this systemis on digitisation of images for low-costreproducibility and retrieval of pictureswith clarity adequate for identification purposes.
Mounted on a mobile van, the system consists of a black and white videocamera, image monitor, personal computer with frame grabber, paper cutterand laminator. The video signals fromthe camera are fed into the video capture board of a frame grabber whichdigitises and records the image. Then the video display board generates the output for display on the image monitor, which can be scaled and stored on ahard disk. The 1-card information is formatted so that 4 1-cards can be printedsimultaneously.