Recent Patents in Signal Processing (December 2012) - Watermarking

For our December 2011 edition, we focus on patents in the area of Watermarking. Insertion of a watermark in a signal enables several security and retrieval-related functionalities, including signal authentication, copyright protection, tampering detection, non-repudiation, and media fingerprinting. The selection below includes patents issued in the recent past, and covers watermarking of text documents, halftone images, video signals and even electronic chip designs.  If you have an interesting patent to share when we feature Watermarking-related patents the next time, or if you are especially interested in a signal processing research field that you would want to be highlighted in this section, please send email to Shantanu Rane (rane AT merl DOT com).

US 8,055,903, "Signal watermarking in the presence of encryption", by A. Adhikari, S. Garg, A. Krishnakumar, and N. Singh, filed 15 February 2007, issued 8 November 2011, assigned to Avaya, Inc. (Basking Ridge, NJ).

US 8,049,930, "Method of halftone watermarking for hiding multi-tone watermark or two-tone watermark", by J.-M. Guo and Y.-F. Liu, filed 15 September 2008, issued 1 November 2011, assigned to National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (Taipei, TW).

US 8,032,909, "Watermarking and electronic program guides", by B. Davis and T. Rodriguez, filed 13 June 2002, issued 4October 2011, assigned to Digimarc Corp. (Beaverton, OR).

US 8,014,557, "Watermarking electronic text documents", by A. Alattar and O. alattar, filed 17 June 2004, issued 6 September 2011, assigned to Digimarc Corp. (Beaverton, OR).

US 7,945,070, "Geographic-based watermarking keys", by H.Andrews III, S. Rosove, and T. Rodriguez, filed 24 February 2006, issued 17 May 2011, assigned to Digimarc Corp. (Beaverton, OR).

US 7,940,954, "Watermarking digital representations that have undergone lossy compression", by P. Horvatic and N. Schiffner, filed 26 November 2003, issued 10 May 2011, assigned to Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Angewandten Forschung E.V. (Munich, Germany).

US 7,894,630, "Tamper-resistant text stream watermarking", by W. Pullen and B. Miller, filed 13 July 2010, issued 22 February 2011, assigned to Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, WA).

US 7,880,934, "Methods and apparatus for watermarking digitally printed documents", by L. Man, filed 6 December 2007, issued 1 February 2011, assigned to Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (Foster City, CA).

US 7,801,325, "Watermarking a chip design based on frequency of geometric structures", by A. Hetzel and I. Peyrot, filed 29 June 2006, issued 21 September 2010, assigned to Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (San Jose, CA).

US 7,702,127, "Video fingerprinting using complexity-regularized video watermarking by statistics quantization", by M. Mihcak and O. Harmanci, filed 21 October 2005, issued 20 April 2010, assigned to Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA).