John D. Lord

Estimating synchronization signal phase

To read a watermark from printed images requires that the watermarking system read correctly after affine distortions. One way to recover from affine distortions is to add a synchronization signal in the Fourier frequency domain and use this synchronization signal to estimate the applied affine distortion. Using the Fourier Magnitudes one can estimate the linear portion of the affine distortion. To estimate the translation one must first estimate the phase of the synchronization signal and then use phase correlation to estimate the translation. In this paper we provide a new method to measure the phase of the synchronization signal using only the data from the complex Fourier domain. This data is used to compute the linear portion, so it is quite convenient to estimate the phase without further data manipulation. The phase estimation proposed in this paper is computationally simple and provides a significant computational advantage over previous methods while maintaining similar accuracy. In addition, the phase estimation formula gives a general way to interpolate images in the complex frequency domain.

Digimarc Discover on Google Glass

This paper reports on the implementation of the Digimarc® Discover platform on Google Glass, enabling the reading of a watermark embedded in a printed material or audio. The embedded watermark typically contains a unique code that identifies the containing media or object and a synchronization signal that allows the watermark to be read robustly. The Digimarc Discover smartphone application can read the watermark from a small portion of printed image presented at any orientation or reasonable distance. Likewise, Discover can read the recently introduced Digimarc Barcode to identify and manage consumer packaged goods in the retail channel. The Digimarc Barcode has several advantages over the traditional barcode and is expected to save the retail industry millions of dollars when deployed at scale. Discover can also read an audio watermark from ambient audio captured using a microphone. The Digimarc Discover platform has been widely deployed on the iPad, iPhone and many Android-based devices, but it has not yet been implemented on a head-worn wearable device, such as Google Glass. Implementing Discover on Google Glass is a challenging task due to the current hardware and software limitations of the device. This paper identifies the challenges encountered in porting Discover to the Google Glass and reports on the solutions created to deliver a prototype implementation.