International Business Machines Corporation

Ashutosh Kulshreshtha

Pradeep Kumar Dubey

Gaurav Aggarwal

Sugata Ghosal

Chai Wah Wu

Charles Philippe Tresser

Marco Martens

Robert J Von Gutfeld

Sean William Smith

Steve Harris Weingart

Bruce A Scott

Nabil M Amer

Abhinanda Sarkar

Vernon Ralph Austel

Sreerama Kolluru Venkata Murthy

Ashish Kumar Gupta

Nitin Punamkumar Garq

Deepavan Chakrabarti

Tumkur Venkatanarayana Rao Ravi

A method (and system) for guaranteeing authenticity of an object, includes providing a sample of material obtainable only by at least one of chemical and physical processes such that the sample is random and not reproducible, associating a number reproducibly to the sample by using a specific reader, and forming at least one coded version of the number, the at least one coded version being obtained by a key signature, and the version being recorded into an area of the object.

Method and apparatus for producing duplication- and imitation-resistant identifying marks on objects, and duplication- and duplication- and imitation-resistant objects

A method is presented for marking high-quality digital images with a robust and invisible watermark. It requires the mark to survive and remain detectable and authenticatable through all image manipulations that in themselves do not damage the image beyond useability. These manipulations include JPEG &ldquo;lossy&rdquo; compression and, in the extreme, the printing and rescanning of the image. The watermark also has the property that it can detect if the essential contents of the image has changed. The first phase of the method comprises extracting a digest or number N from the image so that N only (or mostly) depends on the essential information content, such that the same number N can be obtained from a scan of a high quality print of the image, from the compressed form of the image, or in general, from the image after minor modifications (introduced inadvertently by processing, noise etc.). The second phase comprises the marking. This can be done in form of an invisible robust watermark, or in form of some visible signature or watermark.

Semi-fragile watermarks

A method of doing meaningful modifications on an image is presented. These modifications can then be used in variety of applications related to image shape manipulation and similar shape retrieval. The method extracts macrofeatures and microfeature from a given shape. Deformations are done on the macrofeatures only. These deformations are either predefined, or are taken from a deformation library, or are calculated from the shape itself, The microfeatures are then added to the deformed macrofeatures to get a deformed shape. The shape deformations then allow user's perception of shape similarity to be learned, which is reflected in the values of parameters in a parameterized shape similarity metric. The user can use one of the deformed shapes as the initial query point, instead of the shape he or she started with. The shape database compression is achieved by storing only the identification of a similar shape and value of global deformations which will generate this shape approximately, instead of storing every shape feature individually.

Method for controlled and meaningful shape modifications

A user at a client machine can customize components of a database search performed at a server. The user does this by sending executable code to the database server. Software code runs as middleware on the database server machine to communicate between the database server and the client and performs the functions of supplying the client with vital information required for generating code which will be used for customizing various processes of the database retrieval session. Typically, the server comprises a set of database servers and the middleware runs on each database server machine to communicate between the database servers and the client. The middleware provides a virtual machine on which the user-supplied code written in a virtual machine language is executed, giving a uniform interface across the set of database servers on which the same user-supplied code will be executed ensuring that the user-supplied code executes under database server specified access privileges.

Customization of information retrieval through user-supplied code

A methodology of highly interactive intra-object relevance feedback is used to retrieve multimedia data from a database. The query object could consist of one or more images, images derived from video, a video sequence, or an audio clip. The query is adjusted using the information fed-back by the user about the relevance of previously extracted part(s) from the object itself, such that the adjusted query is a better approximation to the user's perception. The information fed-back by the user during intra-query modification is used for intra-object learning of the user's perception. The refined query is subsequently used for inter-object relevance feedback where data is retrieved from the database based on parameters learnt by intra-query object feedback mechanism, and the user provides feedback by ranking the retrieved objects in order of their relevance to him or her. In the system according to the invention, inter-object learning of user's perception is expedited by utilizing the learnt parameters in the intra-object relevance feedback. Furthermore, the methodology of the invention allows for building refined queries based on part(s) or sub-sequence(s) of the query object rather than the entire object itself, thereby reducing the number of irrelevant objects, retrieved from the database. The methodology allows synthesis and modification of the input query object itself in the event a query object is not directly available, and, also to learn the user's perception.

Interactive framework for understanding user's perception of multimedia data

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New Delhi, India

Ashutosh Kulshreshtha