High Capacity Analog Channels for Smart Documents

Widely-used valuable hardcopy documents such as passports, visas, driving licenses, educational certificates, entrance-passes for entertainment events etc. are conventionally protected against counterfeiting and data tampering attacks by applying analog security technologies (e.g. KINEGRAMS®, holograms, micro-printing, UV/IR inks etc.). How-ever, easy access to high quality, low price modern desktop publishing technology has left most of these technologies ineffective, giving rise to high quality false documents. The higher price and restricted usage are other drawbacks of the analog document pro-tection techniques. Digital watermarking and high capacity storage media such as IC-chips, optical data stripes etc. are the modern technologies being used in new machine-readable identity verification documents to ensure contents integrity; however, these technologies are either expensive or do not satisfy the application needs and demand to look for more efficient document protection technologies. In this research three different high capacity analog channels: high density data stripe (HD-DataStripe), data hiding in printed halftone images (watermarking), and super-posed constant background grayscale image (CBGI) are investigated for hidden com-munication along with their applications in smart documents. On way to develop high capacity analog channels, noise encountered from printing and scanning (PS) process is investigated with the objective to recover the digital information encoded at nearly maximum channel utilization. By utilizing noise behaviour, countermeasures against the noise are taken accordingly in data recovery process. HD-DataStripe is a printed binary image similar to the conventional 2-D barcodes (e.g. PDF417), but it offers much higher data storage capacity and is intended for machine-readable identity verification documents. The capacity offered by the HD-DataStripe is sufficient to store high quality biometric characteristics rather than extracted templates, in addition to the conventional bearer related data contained in a smart ID-card. It also eliminates the need for central database system (except for backup record) and other ex-pensive storage media, currently being used. While developing novel data-reading tech-nique for HD-DataStripe, to count for the unavoidable geometrical distortions, registra-tion marks pattern is chosen in such a way so that it results in accurate sampling points (a necessary condition for reliable data recovery at higher data encoding-rate). For more sophisticated distortions caused by the physical dot gain effects (intersymbol interfer-ence), the countermeasures such as application of sampling theorem, adaptive binariza-tion and post-data processing, each one of these providing only a necessary condition for reliable data recovery, are given. Finally, combining the various filters correspond-ing to these countermeasures, a novel Data-Reading technique for HD-DataStripe is given. The novel data-reading technique results in superior performance than the exist-ing techniques, intended for data recovery from printed media. In another scenario a small-size HD-DataStripe with maximum entropy is used as a copy detection pattern by utilizing information loss encountered at nearly maximum channel capacity. While considering the application of HD-DataStripe in hardcopy documents (contracts, official letters etc.), unlike existing work [Zha04], it allows one-to-one contents matching and does not depend on hash functions and OCR technology, constraints mainly imposed by the low data storage capacity offered by the existing analog media. For printed halftone images carrying hidden information higher capacity is mainly attributed to data-reading technique for HD-DataStripe that allows data recovery at higher printing resolution, a key requirement for a high quality watermarking technique in spatial domain. Digital halftoning and data encoding techniques are the other factors that contribute to data hiding technique given in this research. While considering security aspects, the new technique allows contents integrity and authenticity verification in the present scenario in which certain amount of errors are unavoidable, restricting the usage of existing techniques given for digital contents. Finally, a superposed constant background grayscale image, obtained by the repeated application of a specially designed small binary pattern, is used as channel for hidden communication and it allows up to 33 pages of A-4 size foreground text to be encoded in one CBGI. The higher capacity is contributed from data encoding symbols and data reading technique

The adoption and impact of computer integrated prepress systems in the printing and publishing industries of Kuwait

This research is aimed at developing a comprehensive picture of the implications of digital technology in the graphic arts industries in Kuwait. The purpose of the study is twofold: (1) to explore the meaning of the outcomes of recent technological change processes for the traditional prepress occupations in Kuwait; and, (2) to examine the impact of technology on Arabic layout and design. The study is based on the assumption that technological change is a chain of interactions among the sociological, cultural, political and economic variables. The prepress area in Kuwait has its own cultural, social, economic, and political structure. When a new technology is introduced it is absorbed and shaped by the existing structure. Based on such a dialectical conceptualisation, four major levels of analysis can be distinguished in this study: (1) technological change in the graphic arts industries; (2) the typographic evolution of the Arabic script; (3) the workers themselves as individuals and occupational collectives; and, (4) technology's impact on Arabic publication design. The methodological approach selected for this study can be defined as a dialectical, interpretive exploration. Given the historical perspective and the multiple levels of analysis, this approach calls for a variety of data gathering methods. Both qualitative and quantitative data were sought. A combination of document analysis, participant observation and interviewing allow to link the historical and current events with individual and collective actions, perceptions and interpretations of reality. The findings presented in this study contradicts the belief that the widespread adoption of new production processes is coincidental with continuous advances in scientific knowledge which provide the basis for the development of new technologies. Instead, the changes have been hindered by the lack of untrained personnel, the Arabic software incompatibility, and the lack of informed decisions to successfully implement the technology. Without any doubt, the new technology has influenced Arabic calligraphy, but this does not mean the decay of Arabic calligraphy as an art. As this study shows, the challenge is not to the art, but to the artist

Towards a fugitive press: materiality and the printed photograph in artists’ books

The aim of my research is to demonstrate how a practice of hand made books based on the materiality of the photographic print and photo-reprography, could engage with notions of touch in the digital age. We take for granted that most artists’ books are made from paper using lithography and bound in the codex form, yet this technology has served neither producer nor reader well. As Hayles (2002:22) observed: We are not generally accustomed to thinking about the book as a material metaphor, but in fact it is an artifact whose physical properties and historical usage structure our interactions with it in ways obvious and subtle. My research examines the discourse surrounding the materiality of the photographic print within artists’ publishing and explores book handling as a research method to identify non-codex forms that invite non-sequential reading, physical interaction and touch. The primary purpose of the practice element of my research is to test disruptive making strategies and fugitive materials, in order to make tacit knowledge explicit in the physical forms of prototypes and finished artists’ books that operate beyond our horizons of expectations. My practice interconnects the separate fields of documentary photography and curating photography and the vernacular together with visual humour and seeks to restore a connection with the ‘thingness’ of photography largely absent in the post-digital age

Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

“we Send Our News By Lightning . . .”: The Information Explosion Of The Nineteenth Century And Adaptation In The Press, 1840-1892

This dissertation examines the change that came to American newspapers and reporting between 1840 and 1892 as the result of increasing communication bandwidth and the emergence of fast communication networks. Improvements in news distribution by post roads, steam navigation, and steam railways, followed by application of telegraphic communications, significantly speeded the news and changed the news cycle itself by linking metropolitan news centers with peripheral newspapers. The American Civil War brought this new information technology together with an event that created massive audience demand for timely and factual news, as opposed to purely political or commercial information. In postwar years the press moved toward an increasingly fact-based and professionalized form of reporting that supplanted the earlier Party Press and Penny Press. Newspapers democratized the expensive new communication technology of the Morse telegraph, making its benefits available to a wide audience, but also created a powerful news monopoly in the process. Newspapers assigned themselves new roles of interpreting national issues for an imagined national audience, and used techniques such as framing and agenda setting to create media identities for groups like Irish, German, and Chinese immigrants or events such as the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. The rise of communication networks under Western Union and ancillary telegraph networks eventually allowed Western Associated Press newspapers in the hinterland to take power away from the dominant New York Associated Press, supplanting it with a new national news organization named the Associated Press but based in Chicago. This created a new kind of news coverage, one that was spare, uniform in style, and which attempted to move beyond opinion, presaging the twentieth century “full news” approach to journalism. In this process the newspapers of the mid nineteenth century leading into the Gilded Age demonstrated intentional progress toward a modern form of journalism

Strangers in a Strange Land

In this text Manning examines the formation of nineteenth-century intelligentsia print publics in the former Soviet republic of Georgia both anthropologically and historically. At once somehow part of “Europe,” at least aspirationally, and yet rarely recognized by others as such, Georgia attempted to forge European style publics as a strong claim to European identity. These attempts also produced a crisis of self-definition, as European Georgia sent newspaper correspondents into newly re-conquered Oriental Georgia, only to discover that the people of these lands were strangers. In this encounter, the community of “strangers” of European Georgian publics proved unable to assimilate the people of the “strange land” of Oriental Georgia. This crisis produced both notions of Georgian public life and European identity which this book explores