In China, a person must have a name seal to perform everyday functions such as withdrawing money from a bank, but visually authenticating the seals can take 5 to 10 minutes. To speed up the process, researchers from Yuan Ze University in Taiwan have constructed a computerized reference function that allows almost instant analysis of seals scanned with a laser and CCD detector.

The function uses a joint-transform-correlator method to mathematically compare, by means of Fourier analysis, input from a scanned image to a stored data matrix representing the authentic image. This approach is designed to allow processing of somewhat blurred or smudged seals without the need to position them for scanning.