Invisible Digital Copyright ID p. 62

By: Mark Fitzgerald

British company plans to soon formally introduce the technique sp.

A BRITISH COMPANY will soon formally introduce a digital image copyright identification technique that leaves an invisible ID that survives even vigorous electronic retouching.
Nottingham-based MOR Ltd. says it developed a technique that defeats image piracy by threading a combination of header, "fingerprints" and alphanumeric ID sentences throughout an image.
The identification itself remains "transparent," but can be "interrogated" by copyright holders using MOR software, the small development company says.
MOR says the technique it calls FBI, for Fingerprinted Bitmapped Images, continues to cling to the image even through transformations such as scaling, cropping, color and file format changes.
"Digital manipulation of the image would have destroyed its value by the time the identification was spoiled," said Glynn Hartley, who heads sales and marketing for the upstart company.
"The ID, and a significant enough portion of it, survives vigorous retouching, including pixel cloning, cropping, painting and color changes," Hartley said.
MOR says the transparent FBI technique represents a big leap from existing visible copyright identifiers.
These can be relatively easily manipulated out of an image if they are discreet ? and they mar image quality if they are complex enough to make retouching difficult.
Further, MOR says, its ID survives data exchanges between software packages and hardware platforms.
In a telephone interview from his Nottingham office, Hartley said the company also is working to develop ways that ensure the FBI ID ? and image quality ? survives digital compression.
"Not only are we working with JPEG to coordinate with the standard, but also we are working with a company that has optimized JPEG because JPEG and other compressions are quite 'loss-ey.' We are concerned that the highest quality images should not suffer in a 'loss-ey' compression," Hartley said. JPEG designates the Joint Photographic Experts Group's digital compression standard. 'Loss-ey' refers to information lost in the compression and decompression process.
The company working on "optimized" JPEG, which Hartley declined to identify, has said the FBI ID will survive compression, he said.
There has been no formal launch of FBI.
"The product doesn't exist in a box yet," Hartley said, but development is complete and FBI is being used by two "significant" international end-users, a photo library and an image bank, for which MOR is providing "custom support."
MOR also is exploring sales to other libraries, news organizations, digital camera and scanning manufacturers, Hartley said.
Formal launch will be in the second half of 1994, Hartley said.
The FBI technique was invented by Otso Paatelma.
MOR managing director Mike Burman said the technique is a "response to growing anxiety within the imaging industry . . . based on the ease with which photographic and computer-generated images can be readily acquired and used for commercial gain by anybody with a PC without any acknowledgement and, most importantly, no payment to the creator of the image.
"What happens in the case where some valuable image has been electronically edited?" Burman added. "Suppose the copier, on his PC, replaces the sky with a different one. To the eye they are different photographs ? but not to FBI. Because of the way that FBI fingerprints the image, the alterations to the original image can be mapped.
FBI's three levels of protection, MOR said, come from a descriptive header, electronic "fingerprints" invisible in the image and "ID sentences which are user-definable and can contain characters, names and dates."
Each image, the company said, can be uniquely coded with the copyright traceable to the owner.