The vast majority of copied documents generally consist of text, and the copy quality mostly depends on the text’s reproduction quality. A new technique to enhance dark text on light background of scanned mixed mode documents (containing text, graphics and photo) is presented to improve copy quality. This technique incorporates various image processing filters that enhance dark text without dis...

Nidhi Garg writes an article about how design patent protection affects product lines and the average consumer. The analysis is done in light of the case between Apple and Samsung over patents relating to iPhones and iPads. The article focuses on design patent protection and how it has evolved over history. After an analysis of the laws, regulation, and case law related to design patents the ar...

DISCLAIMER The observations articulated in this report and its appendices represent Ross & Associates' interpretation of the research, case study information, and interviews with lean experts and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the organizations or lean experts interviewed or researched as part of this effort. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives have reviewed...

Various mechanisms are available for protecting software services. Some rely on software protection, some on hardware and some on both. There has been much discussion about protection options, but there is surprising little hard data on relative costs. This paper provides detailed measurements of five different protection schemes and quantifies their impact on performance. These measurements le...

DISCLAIMER The observations articulated in this report and its appendices represent Ross & Associates' interpretation of the research, case study information, and interviews with lean experts and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the organizations or lean experts interviewed or researched as part of this effort. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives have reviewed...

Interoperability in digital TV is still hampered by proprietary content protection systems. The OPIMA specification offers a generic solution for multimedia terminals, in which the end-user’s terminal is adapted to a content protection system by downloading a corresponding plug-in. This paper describes the OPIMA solution and shows how it can be applied to digital TV.

The entertainment industry, facing a formidable threat from peer-topeer piracy networks, is exploring every possible means to attack these networks. The industry is also employing defensive strategies to protect media and media players from those who would extract and copy their content. These content protection systems depend on the computer industry’s newly announced ‘trusted computing’ techn...

We propose to reformulate the payoff matrix structure of Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, by introducing threat and greed factors, and show their effect on the co-evolution of memory and cooperation. Our findings are as follows. (i) Memory protects cooperation. (ii) To our surprise, greater memory size is unfavorable to evolutionary success when there is no threat. In the absence of threat, subsequent ...