In a recent joint report, the European Police Office (EUROPOL) and the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) pointed out the disastrous economical (200 billion USD per year) and health-related consequences of goods counterfeit. The dreadful events that have recently happened in Europe made evident that travel and identity documents such as passports or ID cards are among the most counterfeited products. Counterfeiters have also benefit of the recent development in fabrication and characterization technologies that paradoxically, had led, to important advances in the Optical Document Security (ODS) domain. There is therefore a need for even more innovative optical security devices involving complex designs and new materials difficult, if not impossible, to fabricate without specialized laboratory equipment. ODISSEA lies within this context. The project aims at developing the first stage towards innovative ODS. That is, a computational tool that should serve to settle the basis for a more efficient and intelligent way to characterize the Diffracted Optically Variable Image Device (DOVID) required for the security applications just mentioned. The ultimate goal of the project is two-folded. From an applicative point of view, we aim at going much further into the analysis of the devices and working principles. We expect to have a modular toolbox that should serve as a starting point for the modeling, characterization and optimization of the relevant optical and material parameters involved in the visual response of DOVIDs. Here we will couple rigorous numerical methods with optimization techniques. A selection of the most suitable numerical tools, commercial or in-house, will be done through a comparison of their performance when applied to reference diffractive/periodic structures provided by SURYS. By combining the most efficient modeling and optimization codes, we expect to design original and efficient DOVIDs, compatible with a mass production. To test the optimized design, a few of the structures will be fabricated. The consortium is going to lean on the fabrication process developed by SURYS (Recombining, roll to roll, layer deposition or varnish deposition) as well as the fast prototyping techniques developed at UTT. To ensure a real feedback between the modeling and the experiment, the fabricated structure must be perfectly known or at least should have an opto-geometrical shape close to that of the structure used in the numerical stage. Other research ways are going to be explored thanks to the partner expertises on the study of the spectral response of nano-particules or the effect of surface roughness on the spectral response of layered structures well suited for mass production. From a more fundamental point of view, we also aim to explore further the capabilities of plasmonic structures combined or not with dielectric resonant waveguides for the design of more efficient and secure DOVIDs. This new and high potential design will rely on the academic partners’ expertise in integrated near field optics. We will explore the possibilities and limitations of combining current holographic technologies, which usually make use of flexible polymeric substrates, with glass integrated optics for security applications such as labeling, optical sensing or filtering, where the use of holographic nano-structured membranes deposed on a glass substrate could be a way to add new functionalities to the low cost glass waveguide technology and further enlarge the application scope for our industrial partner.