[Problem] To provide an educational toy which allows an observed action to be experienced artificially. [Solution] A toy system (900) is used by bringing a magnifying-glass type hand-held instrument (930) into contact with a page (912) of a main body portion (910) having a picture portion (914). The magnifying-glass type hand-held instrument (930) captures an image of the picture portion (914), and determines the location, within the image in said picture portion, that has been captured. From pre-stored image data of a picture image that is the same as the picture portion (914), image data for a part (a partial image) corresponding to the location being captured are then read out and are displayed on a touch panel (942). If the location being captured fulfills certain location conditions, one image element from image elements W41 to W49 is also selected as a special image and is displayed superimposed on the partial image.

The present disclosure relates generally to digital watermarking for retail product packaging. A digital watermark can be carried in different color channels, and at with different signal polarities. Detection can utilize different illumination sources or image sensors with various filters to highlight signal in one or more of the channels.

A document generation system creates a secure document by: receiving document content to be printed onto a substrate; creating a stencil mask comprising an image of at least a portion of the document content; receiving an image of a watermark to be printed on the substrate; modifying the watermark to remove portions of the watermark that will correspond to locations of the stencil mask; causing a print device to print the document content on the substrate; and causing the print device to print the modified watermark through the stencil mask on the substrate.

The present disclosure relates to digital watermarking. One claim recites a method to detect two or more different digital watermarks in media. The method includes: receiving captured imagery of the media, the captured imagery comprising a plurality of image frames; for a first image frame applying a first watermark detector to search for a first digital watermark hidden within the first image frame, in which an electronic processor is programmed as the first watermark detector; and for a second image frame applying a second, different watermark detector to search for a second, different watermark hidden within the second image frame, in which an electronic processor is programmed as the second watermark detector. Other claims and combinations are provided too.

A printing system includes an image forming apparatus capable of performing visible printing and invisible printing and a terminal apparatus. The terminal apparatus includes first circuitry. The first circuitry adds a printing command instructing to invisibly print an image of a two-dimensional code obtained by two-dimensionally encoding a print target image to print data generated based on the print target image. The first circuitry transmits, to the image forming apparatus, the print data to which the printing command is added. The image forming apparatus including second circuitry. The second circuitry visibly prints the print target image based on the print data transmitted from the terminal apparatus, and invisibly prints the image of the two-dimensional code according to the printing command added.

There is described a new coding approach for printed document authentication, one objective of which is to increase the difficulty of copying. In addition, this new coding approach provides better performance compared to other 2D coding technologies under certain constraints. The new coding technique requires less print space in comparison to other coding techniques. This is achieved by optimizing some of the features which are used in standard 2D-codes for stabilization and which are necessary for e.g. mobile applications. Furthermore, the code can be decomposed in elementary units, or byte-units which can be widely spread over a text document. Such byte-units can in particular be used for integration in text symbols. If a document protected with such a coding is copied, at least some of these symbols will be extensively degraded by the copying process. Therefore, copy detection is intrinsically achieved thanks to the new coding technique.

A system and method for verifying that a document is included in a document management system is disclosed. This system and method includes scanning of a scan track of a document, generating document data dependently upon the scanning, comparing the generated document data to stored document data, the stored document data generated dependently upon a prior scanning of the scan track of the document, and outputting an indication of the document being included in the document management system as determined by the comparing.

A processor of an MFP generates a first additional image based on an image in a designated region of a document. Furthermore, the processor of the MFP generates a second additional image showing a difference between the document and a document before revision of the document. Then, the processor of the MFP registers the first additional image and the second additional image on a server in association with a marker image showing the revised edition number of the document.

An information processing apparatus includes a communication interface to communicate data including image data with an image forming apparatus, a data storage device to store background pattern data, and circuitry. The circuitry causes the communication interface to transmit the background pattern data and a registration request command to the image forming apparatus, generates synthesis information, generates a background pattern synthesis drawing command for instructing the image forming apparatus to synthesize the background pattern data with each page data of the image data, based on the synthesis information of the page data, generates a printing command for printing the image data, generates print request information for requesting the image forming apparatus to print the image data, and causes the communication interface to transmit the print request information to the image forming apparatus.

This disclosure describes a distributed reader architecture for a mobile computing device such as cellular telephone handset. One claim recites a portable computing device including: memory for storing a library of processing components, the library including a signal detector component and an audio fingerprinting component; a microphone for capturing ambient audio; one or more processors configured for: invoking the audio fingerprinting component for processing captured audio to produce an audio fingerprint, wherein the audio fingerprinting component comprises a filtering process, in which the filtering process produces components of the captured audio that are used to produce the audio fingerprint; and invoking the signal detector component, in which the signal detector component comprises a fast detect process for analyzing the captured audio to determine the presence of an auxiliary signal within the captured audio, and when the presence of the auxiliary signal is detected, controlling the signal detector component for detecting the auxiliary signal to yield a detected auxiliary signal. The device further includes a communications output for communicating the audio fingerprint and the detected auxiliary signal to a remotely located server. Of course, other claims and combinations are provided as well.