Today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital fingerprinting and digital watermarking (a form of steganography). Assigned to Adobe, the first patent addresses techniques for content creation, fingerprints, and watermarks. Assigned to Nielsen, the second patent addresses techniques for using steganographically-encoded time information as basis to establish a time offset, to facilitate taking content-related action.
11,048,779, "Content creation, fingerprints, and watermarks," assigned to Adobe.
Abstract
Content creation and licensing control techniques are described. In a first example, a content creation service is configured to support content creation using an image along with functionality to locate the image or a similar image that is available for licensing. In another example, previews of images are used to generate different versions of content along with an option to license images previewed in an approved version of the content. In a further example, fingerprints are used to locate images used as part of content creation by a content creation service without leaving a context of the service. In yet another example, location of licensable versions of images is based at least in part on identification of a watermark included as part of an image. In an additional example, an image itself is used as a basis to locate other images available for licensing by a content sharing service.
11,051,057, "Use of steganographically-encoded time information as basis to establish a time offset, to facilitate taking content-related action," assigned to The Nielsen Company.
Abstract
A method and system for using steganographically-encoded time information as a basis to control when a client carries out a content-related action. The client processes for presentation one or more linear media streams, each defining a respective time sequence of frames of media content, and at least one of the streams being steganographically encoded with at least one watermark at a respective time-point within the stream, the watermark encoding a timestamp of the respective time-point within the stream according to a server clock. The client extracts the timestamp from the watermark and computes a time offset based on a difference between the extracted timestamp and a current time according to a client clock. And the client uses the computed time offset as a basis to determine when the client should carry out a content-related action in a given one of the one or more linear media streams.