THE CONNECTED PACKAGE Dynamic, Updated, Customized Printed Packaging Communication

Current packaging identifications are based on barcode, Ean/GTIN, QR code. These systems offered great advantages but with some limitations: bad impact, duplicability and they are unreadable. Printed package, today, is simply a container, a static product. Printed packaging communication is already obsolete when products arrive on the shelf, while Consumers ask to be key player: They need information, interactivity, customization. “The connected package” represents the next generation in packaging communication. StealthCode® is based on Digimarc® technology, a unique watermark enhanced into the file design. It adds traditional GTIN barcode and URL information over the entire surface of the package without compromising design because it is imperceptible to the human eye. StealthCode® platform technology system is composed by a free app (iOS/Android) for customer experience & dynamic communication and a powerful BackOffice for big data collection: StealthCode® system represents the most advanced example of dynamic communication. It is useful for brands and products promotion (Brand Loyalty & Customer Engagement), keeping track of each single watermark (readings, location, URL),collecting big data to adopt customized marketing strategies and to enrich the customer experience: Simply scanning the product using the free App StealthCode®, users enjoy the contents, strategic for marketing and communication (product information, receipts, advises)

Digital watermarking and novel security devices

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Impact of UPC Placement on the Biomechanical Injury Risk Factors Associated with Cashier Work

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of UPC placement on upper-body kinematics and muscle activity associated with cashier work. Seventeen female participants who had worked at least 1000 hours as a cashier and did not meet any exclusion criteria were recruited. Multi-sided UPC items, which included extra and/or larger barcodes, were compared to items with a traditional UPC placement. Two mock carts of eighteen items were scanned for each UPC type. Electromyography was applied bilaterally to the biceps brachii, middle deltoid, flexor digitorum superficialis, and upper trapezius muscles. Cumulative and peak muscle activity were calculated for each trial. Motion capture was placed on the torso, upper arm, forearm, and hand segments and tracked using a Qualysis motion capture system. Range of motion (ROM) values for shoulder flexion/extension, abduction/adduction, and internal/external rotation were calculated. The time to scan each cart from initial movement to return to starting position was also measured. A main effect of UPC type on cumulative muscle activity was found for all muscles (biceps brachii p=.002, middle deltoid p=.003, flexor digitorum p=.001, upper trapezius p=.001), all were lower with multi-sided UPC. For peak muscle activity, there was an interaction between UPC type and side (p=.036), values on the left were lower with multi-sided UPC items. There was also an interaction between UPC type and side for flexion/extension ROM (p=.031), with multi-sided UPC items reducing ROM by an average of 6 degrees. Mock carts with traditional items took an average a 5 fewer seconds to complete. Future studies should investigate if the increased efficiency and lower cumulative muscle activity is beneficial over the course of an entire work shift

Digital marketing in retail : what are the benefits a Swiss premium department store could reap when adapting to the changing environment of digitization? A maturity model

The force of digitization has empowered customers with an omni-present access to a worldwide bazar of products and information. This shift has compelled traditional retailers to expand their channels and touchpoints to wherever the customer wishes to be served. The new scattered landscape of touchpoints and the rapid development of increasingly sophisticated technology have confronted marketers with new challenges and opportunities alike. Meanwhile, Swiss premium department stores, are still considered ‘nondigital’. This thesis addressed their need for both an analysis of digital marketing tools and a guideline for its implementation. Therefore, the aim of this Bachelor’s thesis was to outline the benefits of a digital marketing transformation and to offer a new customercentric digital marketing maturity model tailored to Swiss Premium Department Stores. The research therefore focused on determining maturity stages and goals through an analysis of current marketing-, retail- and customer trends. Furthermore, digital marketing tools have been evaluated based on their benefits and were aligned to the corresponding stages. The findings show that a digital transformation is a rapidly evolving process retailers essentially need to keep up with. The thesis suggests three key milestones of a digital transformation to build an essential basis for the implementation of future technology: Mobile, big data and RFID. The major benefits of a digital transformation result from the increased connectivity of the customer that allows real-time interaction throughout the entire shopping journey. With new technological solutions, such as beacon technology, marketers are able to identify a customer before entering a store. Another major benefit, presents the increased on- and offline convergence, especially through interactive shopping tools such augmented reality. Both of the mentioned technologies benefit from big data, which allows to use a unified customer view to apply personalization as a powerful tool for almost any marketing appliance. Another significant finding is the extension of existing maturity models from a current final maturity stage of ‘omni-channel’ to ‘No- Line retail’. No-Line refers to collaboration with suppliers and competitors to jointly promote a shopping area. The digital marketing maturity model has been tested at the example of Magazine zum Globus AG. Testing the model has proved its applicability. Nevertheless, it is not universally valid. The model is tailored to Swiss Premium Department stores. Further research should focus on the possible synergies that can be generated within the retailing sector through emerging trends, such as smart-cities, to enhance ‘No-Line’ retail

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

Deep learning for retail product recognition: challenges and techniques

Taking time to identify expected products and waiting for the checkout in a retail store are common scenes we all encounter in our daily lives. The realization of automatic product recognition has great significance for both economic and social progress because it is more reliable than manual operation and time-saving. Product recognition via images is a challenging task in the field of computer vision. It receives increasing consideration due to the great application prospect, such as automatic checkout, stock tracking, planogram compliance, and visually impaired assistance. In recent years, deep learning enjoys a flourishing evolution with tremendous achievements in image classification and object detection. This article aims to present a comprehensive literature review of recent research on deep learning-based retail product recognition. More specifically, this paper reviews the key challenges of deep learning for retail product recognition and discusses potential techniques that can be helpful for the research of the topic. Next, we provide the details of public datasets which could be used for deep learning. Finally, we conclude the current progress and point new perspectives to the research of related fields

Design and analysis of Discrete Cosine Transform-based watermarking algorithms for digital images. Development and evaluation of blind Discrete Cosine Transform-based watermarking algorithms for copyright protection of digital images using handwritten signatures and mobile phone numbers.

This thesis deals with the development and evaluation of blind discrete cosine transform-based watermarking algorithms for copyright protection of digital still images using handwritten signatures and mobile phone numbers. The new algorithms take into account the perceptual capacity of each low frequency coefficients inside the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) blocks before embedding the watermark information. They are suitable for grey-scale and colour images. Handwritten signatures are used instead of pseudo random numbers. The watermark is inserted in the green channel of the RGB colour images and the luminance channel of the YCrCb images. Mobile phone numbers are used as watermarks for images captured by mobile phone cameras. The information is embedded multiple-times and a shuffling scheme is applied to ensure that no spatial correlation exists between the original host image and the multiple watermark copies. Multiple embedding will increase the robustness of the watermark against attacks since each watermark will be individually reconstructed and verified before applying an averaging process. The averaging process has managed to reduce the amount of errors of the extracted information. The developed watermarking methods are shown to be robust against JPEG compression, removal attack, additive noise, cropping, scaling, small degrees of rotation, affine, contrast enhancements, low-pass, median filtering and Stirmark attacks. The algorithms have been examined using a library of approximately 40 colour images of size 512 512 with 24 bits per pixel and their grey-scale versions. Several evaluation techniques were used in the experiment with different watermarking strengths and different signature sizes. These include the peak signal to noise ratio, normalized correlation and structural similarity index measurements. The performance of the proposed algorithms has been compared to other algorithms and better invisibility qualities with stronger robustness have been achieved

Multimodal Content Delivery for Geo-services

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location technology and supported by the proliferation of mobile device technology into modern life. Accurate positioning is a known problem for location-based services, contributions in the area of mobile positioning demonstrate a hybrid positioning technology for mobile devices that uses terrestrial beacons to trilaterate position. Information overload is an active concern for location-based applications that struggle to manage large amounts of data, contributions in the area of egocentric visibility that filter data based on field-of-view demonstrate novel forms of multimodal input. One of the more pertinent characteristics of these applications is the delivery or output modality employed (auditory, visual or tactile). Further contributions in the area of multimodal content delivery are made, where multiple modalities are used to deliver information using graphical user interfaces, tactile interfaces and more notably auditory user interfaces. It is demonstrated how a combination of these interfaces can be used to synergistically deliver context sensitive rich media to users - in a responsive way - based on usage scenarios that consider the affordance of the device, the geographical position and bearing of the device and also the location of the device

Suspect Until Proven Guilty, a Problematization of State Dossier Systems via Two Case Studies: The United States and China

This dissertation problematizes the state dossier system (SDS): the production and accumulation of personal information on citizen subjects exceeding the reasonable bounds of risk management. SDS - comprising interconnecting subsystems of records and identification - damage individual autonomy and self-determination, impacting not only human rights, but also the viability of the social system. The research, a hybrid of case-study and cross-national comparison, was guided in part by a theoretical model of four primary SDS driving forces: technology, political economy, law and public sentiment. Data sources included government documents, academic texts, investigative journalism, NGO reports and industry white papers. The primary analytical instrument was the juxtaposition of two individual cases: the U.S. and China. Research found that constraints on the extent of the U.S. SDS today may not be significantly different from China\u27s, a system undergoing significant change amidst growing public interest in privacy and anonymity. Much activity within the U.S., such as the practice of suspicious activity reporting, is taking place outside the domain of federal privacy laws, while ID systems appear to advance and expand despite clear public opposition. Momentum for increasingly comprehensive SDS appears to be growing, in part because the harms may not be immediately evident to the data subjects. The future of SDS globally will depend on an informed and active public; law and policy will need to adjust to better regulate the production and storage of personal information. To that end, the dissertation offers a general model and linguistic toolkit for the further analysis of SDS