I'll be giving that a good read!
If you were local, I'd like to get together for a long talk, I've read a few cognitive articles, and run into some really interesting firsthand examples of how the identical thing is perceived or not by different people.
I think the high resolution scans are the key, At decent magnification the actual fiber structure of the cardboard can be seen, and that's as good as a fingerprint, maybe even a bit better. That would be a more advanced version of what the blowout guy does in finding unique markers on the reverse, which are mostly darker fibers.
I think a computer could spot stuff like that very easily, and that might be one path to knowing if a card had been seen before and what it looked like then.
The downside is the massive database required. Although I have talked about it with my wife who is in software and she didn't see that as a problem, but did see developing the database as a really major task.
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