SureSign Technology:

The result of over four years of research and development, SureSign acts an unseen 'witness' and provides the vital component in the management of valuable visual or audio assets.

SureSign software adds a coded message, popularly called a watermark, which is intricately and imperceptibly interwoven within a digital data object, such as a still image, an illustration, a video or audio recording, to convey information concerning that material. In use, Signum's patented Direct Data Addition (DDA) method means the SureSign watermark is totally transparent, so watermarked objects retain their full creative, commercial and information value and can be used in exactly the same way as unprotected objects.

The SureSign watermark allows the unique identification of a creator or provider of a digital object and provides a user-definable object reference which may be linked to a transaction or an archive record. Assigning a unique user ID which can be instantly traced back to a creator or provider via an interactive database (whether publicly or privately maintained) is an effective method for providing up-to-date contact or marketing information to an end-user.

In the case of an image, a watermark is added by very subtly changing the value of all individual pixels, in a precisely controlled pattern throughout the entire image. Similarly, in audio applications, the amplitude of sound samples is minutely and inaudibly varied.

SureSign watermarks can be embedded into most RGB, CMYK, greyscale and indexed colour raster image file formats and, since no data is actually added, the volume of image data remains unchanged. The SureSign watermark may be detected even after an image file has been cropped, rescaled, compressed, copied, or reused as part of a composite picture - it can even be recovered from printed media. With audio applications, most forms of digitised music, speech or telephony (WAV files, A-Law data, etc.) may be watermarked by SureSign software.

Reassuringly, the SureSign watermark is robust and highly secure, so any attempts to extract, modify or destroy it will result in the carrier object being degraded or rendered unusable. SureSign technology is readily adaptable and may be used on its own or in combination with other protective devices such as encryption, scrambling or visible watermarking.

Signum Technologies offer a range of software solutions for many kinds of professional still imaging, music and new media applications. Future developments are extending the technology to work with new still image and audio formats and full motion video. Read on to discover how SureSign can help you.