Copyright protection for the electronic distribution of text documents

Each copy of a text document can be made different in a nearly invisible way by repositioning or modifying the appearance of different elements of text, i.e., lines, words, or characters. A unique copy can be registered with its recipient, so that subsequent unauthorized copies that are retrieved can be traced back to the original owner. In this paper we describe and compare several mechanisms for marking documents and several other mechanisms for decoding the marks after documents have been subjected to common types of distortion. The marks are intended to protect documents of limited value that are owned by individuals who would rather possess a legal than an illegal copy if they can be distinguished. We will describe attacks that remove the marks and countermeasures to those attacks. An architecture is described for distributing a large number of copies without burdening the publisher with creating and transmitting the unique documents. The architecture also allows the publisher to determine the identity of a recipient who has illegally redistributed the document, without compromising the privacy of individuals who are not operating illegally. Two experimental systems are described. One was used to distribute an issue of the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, and the second was used to mark copies of company private memoranda

Electronic marking and identification techniques to discourage document copying

Modern computer networks make it possible to distribute documents quickly and economically by electronic means rather than by conventional paper means. However, the widespread adoption of electronic distribution of copyrighted material is currently impeded by the ease of illicit copying and dissemination. In this paper we propose techniques that discourage illicit distribution by embedding each document with a unique codeword. Our encoding techniques are indiscernible by readers, yet enable us to identify the sanctioned recipient of a document by examination of a recovered document. We propose three coding methods, describe one in detail, and present experimental results showing that our identification techniques are highly reliable, even after documents have been photocopied

Print-Scan Resilient Text Image Watermarking Based on Stroke Direction Modulation for Chinese Document Authentication

Print-scan resilient watermarking has emerged as an attractive way for document security. This paper proposes an stroke direction modulation technique for watermarking in Chinese text images. The watermark produced by the idea offers robustness to print-photocopy-scan, yet provides relatively high embedding capacity without losing the transparency. During the embedding phase, the angle of rotatable strokes are quantized to embed the bits. This requires several stages of preprocessing, including stroke generation, junction searching, rotatable stroke decision and character partition. Moreover, shuffling is applied to equalize the uneven embedding capacity. For the data detection, denoising and deskewing mechanisms are used to compensate for the distortions induced by hardcopy. Experimental results show that our technique attains high detection accuracy against distortions resulting from print-scan operations, good quality photocopies and benign attacks in accord with the future goal of soft authentication

A study and some experimental work of digital image and video watermarking

The rapid growth of digitized media and the emergence of digital networks have created a pressing need for copyright protection and anonymous communications schemes. Digital watermarking (or data hiding in a more general term) is a kind of steganography technique by adding information into a digital data stream. Several most important watermarking schemes applied to multilevel and binary still images and digital videos were studied. They include schemes based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform), DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), and fractal transforms. The question whether these invisible watermarking techniques can resolve the issue of rightful ownership of intellectual properties was discussed. The watermarking schemes were further studied from malicious attack point of view, which is considered an effective way to advance the watermarking techniques. In particular, the StirMark robustness tests based on geometrical distortion were carried out. A binary watermarking scheme applied in the DCT domain is presented in this research project. The effect of the binarization procedure necessarily encountered in dealing with binary document images is found so strong that most of conventional embedding schemes fail in dealing with watermarking of binary document images. Some particular measures have to be taken. The initial simulation results indicate that the proposed technique is promising though further efforts need to be made

Healthcare Event and Activity Logging.

The health of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can change frequently and inexplicably. Crucial events and activities responsible for these changes often go unnoticed. This paper introduces healthcare event and action logging (HEAL) which automatically and unobtrusively monitors and reports on events and activities that occur in a medical ICU room. HEAL uses a multimodal distributed camera network to monitor and identify ICU activities and estimate sanitation-event qualifiers. At the core is a novel approach to infer person roles based on semantic interactions, a critical requirement in many healthcare settings where individuals' identities must not be identified. The proposed approach for activity representation identifies contextual aspects basis and estimates aspect weights for proper action representation and reconstruction. The flexibility of the proposed algorithms enables the identification of people roles by associating them with inferred interactions and detected activities. A fully working prototype system is developed, tested in a mock ICU room and then deployed in two ICU rooms at a community hospital, thus offering unique capabilities for data gathering and analytics. The proposed method achieves a role identification accuracy of 84% and a backtracking role identification of 79% for obscured roles using interaction and appearance features on real ICU data. Detailed experimental results are provided in the context of four event-sanitation qualifiers: clean, transmission, contamination, and unclean

A MATCH-MOVING METHOD COMBINING AI AND SFM ALGORITHMS IN HISTORICAL FILM FOOTAGE

Searching for suitable material for photogrammetry is a key part in the documentation of Cultural Heritage. Photogrammetry can be used to produce a metrically certified 3D model. Material contained in historical film footage archives is especially useful for documentation when the heritage has been lost. In this research an innovative match-moving method is proposed that aims to exploit Artificial Intelligence and SfM algorithms to identify the frames extracted from a film footage in which the lost monument appears and that are suitable to be processed with photogrammetry for its 3D reconstruction. First of all the identification and tracking of the heritage in the videos was performed training an object detection Neural Network. Then the frames detected were automatically extracted with the coordinates of the bounding boxes that contain the monument. The camera motions were identified by selecting only the shots taken from multiple points of view of the same scene and analysing the evolution of the bounding boxes position over time. A further check of the material was necessary to select only sequences and to eliminate single frames and images from different historic periods. After this process, only the correct frames were automatically selected and processed with photogrammetry and the quality of the obtained 3D model was assessed. The method experimented in this research represents a powerful tool in the field of Cultural Heritage because it makes the selection of suitable material for photogrammetry automatic. Moreover it offers important insights that could be extended to other sectors