In November 2025, inIT was represented at several internationally renowned conferences at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. At the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) and Image and Vision Computing New Zealand (IVCNZ), it presented its latest research findings on the security of AI-supported banknote verification. The program was rounded off by the annual conference of the Artificial Intelligence Researchers Association (AIRA). A total of around 550 researchers from academia and industry took part in the conference week.
Scientific contributions at PRICAI 2025 and IVCNZ 2025
PRICAI 2025 took place from November 17 to 21, 2025, and is one of the leading international conferences in the field of artificial intelligence in the Asia-Pacific region. In a poster session, Julian Knaup, research assistant in the “Discrete Systems” working group headed by Prof. Dr. Volker Lohweg, presented his research findings on the security of wavelet-based banknote authentication systems. The focus was on modern threat models such as adversarial attacks. It was shown how generative AI – in particular Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) – can be used to create targeted and realistic manipulations that can deceive existing verification methods without being visible to humans. The poster presentation met with great interest and led to numerous technical discussions with experts from the fields of AI security and pattern recognition.
The results were also presented at IVCNZ 2025, which took place from November 19 to 21, 2025, and placed a stronger focus on computer vision applications. There, Julian Knaup gave a scientific presentation on the paper “Fake Money, Real Threat: Fooling Wavelet-Based Banknote Authentication with AdvGAN,” which expanded on the approaches discussed in the poster. The work was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Christoph-Alexander Holst and Prof. Dr. Volker Lohweg in the context of the SAIL project – SustAInable Life-cycle of Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems.
International exchange and conference framework
In addition to the scientific program, the conference week offered a wide range of opportunities for international exchange. A joint conference dinner with a traditional haka performance underscored the cultural setting of the event and created space for informal networking and professional discussions.
Contribution to the international visibility of inIT
With its contributions to PRICAI 2025 and IVCNZ 2025, inIT is strengthening its international visibility in the field of research into security-critical and reliable AI systems. The work makes an important contribution to understanding modern threat models in automated banknote verification and highlights the risks arising from the use of generative AI for existing authentication procedures.