New patents are issued by the USTPO on Tuesdays. Today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to MorphoTrust, the first patent addresses techniques for digitally watermarking digital facial portraits. Assigned to Unisys, the second patent addresses techniques for protecting data using steganography ("hidden writing").
10,007,844, "System and method for digitally watermarking digital facial portraits," assigned to MorphoTrust USA, LLC.
Abstract
Some implementations may include a method for watermarking an identification document, the method including: receiving a digitally watermarked digital facial portrait of the person, the digital facial portrait embedded with at least one digital watermark identifying payload data linking the digital facial portrait to the person portrayed in the digital facial portrait; receiving results of comparison between the digital facial portrait of the person and the person presenting the digitally watermarked digital facial portrait; retrieving the at least one digital watermark in response to receiving comparison results that the person portrayed in the digital facial portrait is the person presenting the digitally watermarked digital facial portrait; and determining that the digital facial portrait is authentic based on the retrieved at least one digital watermark.
10,008,132, "Method and system for protecting data using steganography," assigned to Unisys.
Abstract
A method and apparatus for embedding a data message in a carrier object using steganography. The method provides a secret key and determines an indicator channel from a plurality of color channels in the carrier object, wherein the indicator channel is the color channel in the carrier object that has a maximum number of different pixel values in the carrier object. The method generates a sorted indicator channel value array based on the channel values and the frequency of occurrence of each value of the indicator channel in the carrier object. For each indicator channel value in the sorted indicator channel value array, the method iterates through the carrier object to determine the pixel in the carrier object whose indicator channel value is the same as the current indicator channel value in the sorted indicator channel value array. For pixels in the carrier object whose indicator channel value is the same as the current indicator channel value, and based on the value of a portion of the secret key, the method embeds a first portion of the data message into a first color channel other than the indicator color channel and embeds a second portion of the data message into a second color channel other than the indicator color channel and other than the first color channel. The method repeats the iteration and embedding until all of the data message is embedded into the carrier object, thereby generating a stego image.
