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

FrameWorks 3D: composition in the third dimension

Music composition on computer is a challenging task, involving a range of data types to be managed within a single software tool. A composition typically comprises a complex arrangement of material, with many internal relationships between data in different locations - repetition, inversion, retrograde, reversal and more sophisticated transformations. The creation of such complex artefacts is labour intensive, and current systems typically place a significant cognitive burden on the composer in terms of maintaining a work as a coherent whole. FrameWorks 3D is an attempt to improve support for composition tasks within a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) style environment via a novel three-dimensional (3D) user-interface. In addition to the standard paradigm of tracks, regions and tape recording analogy, FrameWorks displays hierarchical and transformational information in a single, fully navigable workspace. The implementation combines Java with Max/MSP to create a cross-platform, user-extensible package and will be used to assess the viability of such a tool and to develop the ideas furthe

Efficient view point selection for silhouettes of convex polyhedra

AbstractSilhouettes of polyhedra are an important primitive in application areas such as machine vision and computer graphics. In this paper, we study how to select view points of convex polyhedra such that the silhouette satisfies certain properties. Specifically, we give algorithms to find all projections of a convex polyhedron such that a given set of edges, faces and/or vertices appear on the silhouette.We present an algorithm to solve this problem in O(k2) time for k edges. For orthogonal projections, we give an improved algorithm that is fully adaptive in the number l of connected components formed by the edges, and has a time complexity of O(klogk+kl). We then generalize this algorithm to edges and/or faces appearing on the silhouette

School business management: a quiet revolution, part 2

"Revolutions in education tend to occur quietly. The upsurge in numbers of teaching assistants and higher level classroom assistants in schools is one such revolution. Another is the growth of school to school leadership support working beyond their own school sites to support other leaders and schools in need of help. A third revolution is presently under way; it is the move to the appointment and effective deployment of school business managers (SBMs). - Page 3

Early literacy support programme : top-up session materials for teaching assistants

These sessions are designed to provide extra support for children who have been included in the ELS Programme and assessed through the ELS ‘Exit Strategy’ (see ELS Book p. 156) and require some additional practice in order to consolidate skills and understanding. The objectives are the same as those for Weeks 9- 12 (Sessions 41- 60), using different texts as a focus to allow for the revisiting and application of skills and understanding in a new context. Audience: KS1 teachers and teaching assistant