New patents are issued by the USPTO on Tuesdays. Today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital fingerprinting and digital watermarking. Assigned to Authentect, the first patent address techniques for authentication of an object, verification of its provenance, and certification of the object as compliant with manufacturing standards. assigned to the Beijing University of Technology (BJUT) (CN), the second patent addresses techniques for embedding and extracting multi-scale space based watermarks.
9,443,298, "Digital fingerprinting object authentication and anti-counterfeiting system," assigned to Authentect, Inc.
Abstract
Improvements are disclosed for authentication of an object, verification of its provenance, and certification of the object as compliant with manufacturing standards. Or, an object may be reported as a suspected counterfeit. In one embodiment the system compares a digital fingerprint of the object, based in image capture, to digital fingerprints previously stored in a database and determines if the object has been registered before and is thus authentic. An object feature template may be created which has a list of features and attributes that are relevant for authenticating particular classes of objects. The object feature template can also be used to examine unregistered objects for signs of counterfeiting.9,443,277, "Method for embedding and extracting multi-scale space based watermark," assigned to Beijing University of Technology (CN).
Abstract
A method for embedding and extracting a multi-scale space based watermark, comprises: constructing a pyramid structure of an original image by dividing each carrier image layer into M square carrier image blocks of the same size; constructing a multi-scale structure of a watermark image; embedding a watermark by embedding each watermark image into a corresponding carrier image block to obtain the original image containing the watermark; locating in the pyramid structure of the original image a target image from which a watermark will be extracted; extracting the watermark by obtaining an estimated watermark by means of the target image block and the reference image block; comparing watermarks by evaluating similarity between the estimated watermark and a watermark image to which the reference image block corresponds. Due to the multi-resolution block pyramid data structure in the present invention, a large scale attack is decomposed into a multi-level small scale attack.
