The digital revolution has brought many benefits to the way we gather, manage and provide information.

As we begin to adopt digital technologies, the issue arises of how to safeguard the integrity and authenticity of digital records which may be required to stand up to judicial or ethical scrutiny.

Signum Technologies' innovative VeriData data validation technology is designed to address this issue by ensuring the integrity of digital visual or audio data at the point of creation or acquisition by providing a highly secure validated master reference file.

The essence of the VeriData process involves a checksum process where precisely calculated but indiscernible 'patterns' are embedded within digital image, video film, or audio recording data. If a data file which has been validated by the VeriData process is subsequently modified in any way, the VeriData detector software will detect the altered pattern. Any changes will be graphically highlighted or alternatively, flagged within a processing system. A confirmation of data integrity will be displayed or flagged where the data file remains intact and unchanged.

Importantly, this is achieved without compromising the quality of the underlying information, increasing the data file size or adding extraneous metadata such as digital signatures.

VeriData was developed with security and law-enforcement applications in mind. It goes without saying therefore, that VeriData is highly secure and incorporates special features to prevent the validation from being applied or undone by an unauthorised agency.

For added peace-of-mind, VeriData software will also allow you to 'tag' your records with information such as the date of acquisition and an administration reference. Once embedded, this hidden provenance information can only be revealed and decoded by corresponding VeriData reader software - it cannot be overwritten or modified without such changes being made obvious. For extra versatility, the embedded data may also be recovered from the printed output (hardcopy) derived from your VeriData tagged digital files.

VeriData currently allows the validation of a diverse range of recorded image data such as bitonal (1-bit) bank document images, 12-bit latent fingerprint images, radiographic images and digital audio recordings as well as more usual 4, 6 and 8-bit continuous tone colour and monochrome images. Signum has plans to support digital video formats in the near future.