Justin Picard | University of Neuchâtel (2024)

Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potenti... more Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potential solution to the problem of industrial counterfeiting. Compared to traditional security solutions (e.g. taggants, holograms, security inks), they are indeed simpler to integrate in existing production workflow, easier to verify, and more cost-effective at scale. In addition, they allow to convey a product digital identity and history, and are used to connect brand owners with consumers. However, by itself a QR Code offers no protection at all against copy by cloning. Various schemes have been proposed to add a copy-sensitive layer to QR Codes, but most techniques in the state of the art have not been applied to real production environments, where QR Codes are printed at mass scale and products are scanned in a non-controlled environment, typically by consumers with their smartphones. This paper presents a system based on integrating copy detection patterns into QR Codes, which has been deployed for a number of years on the market.

NIP & Digital Fabrication Conference

Digital watermarks, sparse dot patterns, and copy detection patterns are different types of copy-... more Digital watermarks, sparse dot patterns, and copy detection patterns are different types of copy-detectable images that have been used to protect documents and other physical objects against counterfeiting. There is a frequent claim about these technologies that they are "virtually impossible to copy" or "extremely hard to forge". But can this claim be quantified? This paper investigates this question from a detection theoretic viewpoint, and shows that under certain conditions, a copy falsely detected as an original is extremely improbable.

L'invention a trait a un procede de creation d'un code a barres 2D (100), qui consiste : ... more L'invention a trait a un procede de creation d'un code a barres 2D (100), qui consiste : - a inclure des informations primaires pouvant etre lues par un lecteur de codes a barres 2D dans un schema d'informations primaires (110), - a inclure des informations secondaires qui sont rendues difficiles a reproduire sans alterer un schema visible (120), ledit schema visible (120) etant inclus dans au moins une zone du code a barres (100) qui ne contient pas d'informations primaires.

Procedure for determining if an analog form of an object is an original analog form, the procedur... more Procedure for determining if an analog form of an object is an original analog form, the procedure comprising the following steps: generating an original digital representation of an authentication pattern, the authentication pattern being a visible authentication pattern; subsequently produce at least one original analog form that includes the authentication pattern from the original digital representation, which causes a first loss of information in said at least one original analog form; make a digital registration from the authentication pattern of said at least one original analog form or another pattern of another analog form derived from said at least one original analog form, which causes a second loss of information in the digital register; compare the digital record with the original digital representation to determine the degree of dissimilarity between the digital record made and the original digital representation; and use the degree of dissimilarity that is equal to th...

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2005

Text Retrieval Conference, 1999

IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 2001

Information retrieval can be seen both as an inference process under uncertainty involving comple... more Information retrieval can be seen both as an inference process under uncertainty involving complex relationships between information items, and as a task of proper assessment of uncertainty. Probabilistic argumentation systems are a technique for reasoning under uncertainty which emphasize both aspects, by clearly distinguishing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of uncertainty. This paper presents the use of probabilistic argumentation systems for (1) taking into account hypertext links in order to improve an initial ranking of documents and (2) considering statistical similarities between query terms to improve their weighting. These two applications can be easily integrated in a retrieval system based on term matching.

CARLOS A. ALVARENGA Accenture When did we start worrying about the origin of products we consume?... more CARLOS A. ALVARENGA Accenture When did we start worrying about the origin of products we consume? Ethical, safety, and environmental concerns about products may seem to be a recent development—one that coincides with the acceleration of globalization. Yet a bit more than two hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, contemporaries of Voltaire were shocked to learn how brutally supply chains of the time often operated: “it is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe,” says the maimed slave to Voltaire’s Candide. Receding further, one finds the famous German Law on Beer Purity—restricting the allowed ingredients in the production of beer to water, barley, and hops—which dates from 1516 and is still in existence today. Yet our interest in product authenticity is probably even older: in ancient Rome, for example, fraudulent wine was common and seals were faked to pass lower-grade Gallic wine off as more costly Roman wine.

In many applications, users specify target values for certain attributes/features without requiri... more In many applications, users specify target values for certain attributes/features without requiring exact matches to these values in return. Instead, the result is typically a ranked list of the top k objects that best match the specified feature values. User subjectivity is an important aspect of such queries, i.e., which objects are relevant to the user and which are not depends on the perception of the user. Due to the subjective nature of similarity-based retrieval, the answers returned by the system to a user query often do not satisfy the user's information need right away; either because the weights and the distance functions associated with the features do not accurately capture the user's perception or because the specified target values do not fully capture her information need or both. The most commonly used technique to overcome this problem is query refinement. In this technique, the user provides to the system some feedback on the "relevance" of the...

présentée à la Faculté des sciences pour obtenir le grade de Docteur ès sciences par

2021 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)

Keywords: IVRG Reference LCAV-CONF-2005-014 Record created on 2005-05-21, modified on 2017-05-12

this paper verifies whether or not hyperlinks improve retrieval effectiveness. In the second chap... more this paper verifies whether or not hyperlinks improve retrieval effectiveness. In the second chapter, we describe experiments on the ad hoc track. In this case, we acknowledge that currently it is becoming more and more difficult to store and manage the growing document collections within a single computer. Recent advances in network technology do however allow us to disseminate information sources by partitioning a single huge corpus (or distributing heterogeneous collections) over a local-area network (Intranet). Most retrieval mechanisms currently proposed however are based on conventional IR models [Salton 89], and where a centralized document collection is assumed.

Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 2021

Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potenti... more Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potential solution to the problem of industrial counterfeiting. Compared to traditional security solutions (e.g. taggants, holograms, security inks), they are indeed simpler to integrate in existing production workflow, easier to verify, and more cost-effective at scale. In addition, they allow to convey a product digital identity and history, and are used to connect brand owners with consumers. However, by itself a QR Code offers no protection at all against copy by cloning. Various schemes have been proposed to add a copy-sensitive layer to QR Codes, but most techniques in the state of the art have not been applied to real production environments, where QR Codes are printed at mass scale and products are scanned in a non-controlled environment, typically by consumers with their smartphones. This paper presents a system based on integrating copy detection patterns into QR Codes, which has been deployed for a number of years on the market.

There is an increasing interest in hypertext systems, digital li braries and the Web. Due to the ... more There is an increasing interest in hypertext systems, digital li braries and the Web. Due to the huge number of pages and links, browsing cannot be viewed as an adequate searching process, even with the introduction of subject directories or other classified lists (e.g., Yahoo!). Therefore, an effective query-based mechanism for accessing information is needed. Nowadays, search engines available on the Web are far from covering all available information, and present many drawbacks. Moreover, most of them ignore hypertext links to enhance their retrieval effectiveness. Recent work in IR on the Web seems to recognize that the hyperlink structure can be very valuable for locating information. This paper exposes some search strategies using hyperlinks. Only a few rigorous experiments deal with such large-sized networked information, and we present some preliminary experiments using a snapshot of around 2.3 Gb extracted from the Web. Our study suggests that the usefulness of interdocumen...

The Internet paradigm permits information searches to be made across wide-area networks where inf... more The Internet paradigm permits information searches to be made across wide-area networks where information is contained in web pages and/or whole document collections such as digital libraries. These new distributed information environments reveal new and challenging problems for the IR community. Consequently, in this TREC experiment we investigated two questions related to information searches on the web or in digital libraries: (1) an analysis of the impact of hyperlinks in improving retrieval performance, and (2) a study of techniques useful in selecting more appropriate text databases (database selection problem encountered when faced with multiple collections), including an evaluation of certain merging strategies effective in producing, single, ranked lists to be presented to the user (database merging problem).

Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potenti... more Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potential solution to the problem of industrial counterfeiting. Compared to traditional security solutions (e.g. taggants, holograms, security inks), they are indeed simpler to integrate in existing production workflow, easier to verify, and more cost-effective at scale. In addition, they allow to convey a product digital identity and history, and are used to connect brand owners with consumers. However, by itself a QR Code offers no protection at all against copy by cloning. Various schemes have been proposed to add a copy-sensitive layer to QR Codes, but most techniques in the state of the art have not been applied to real production environments, where QR Codes are printed at mass scale and products are scanned in a non-controlled environment, typically by consumers with their smartphones. This paper presents a system based on integrating copy detection patterns into QR Codes, which has been deployed for a number of years on the market.

NIP & Digital Fabrication Conference

Digital watermarks, sparse dot patterns, and copy detection patterns are different types of copy-... more Digital watermarks, sparse dot patterns, and copy detection patterns are different types of copy-detectable images that have been used to protect documents and other physical objects against counterfeiting. There is a frequent claim about these technologies that they are "virtually impossible to copy" or "extremely hard to forge". But can this claim be quantified? This paper investigates this question from a detection theoretic viewpoint, and shows that under certain conditions, a copy falsely detected as an original is extremely improbable.

L'invention a trait a un procede de creation d'un code a barres 2D (100), qui consiste : ... more L'invention a trait a un procede de creation d'un code a barres 2D (100), qui consiste : - a inclure des informations primaires pouvant etre lues par un lecteur de codes a barres 2D dans un schema d'informations primaires (110), - a inclure des informations secondaires qui sont rendues difficiles a reproduire sans alterer un schema visible (120), ledit schema visible (120) etant inclus dans au moins une zone du code a barres (100) qui ne contient pas d'informations primaires.

Procedure for determining if an analog form of an object is an original analog form, the procedur... more Procedure for determining if an analog form of an object is an original analog form, the procedure comprising the following steps: generating an original digital representation of an authentication pattern, the authentication pattern being a visible authentication pattern; subsequently produce at least one original analog form that includes the authentication pattern from the original digital representation, which causes a first loss of information in said at least one original analog form; make a digital registration from the authentication pattern of said at least one original analog form or another pattern of another analog form derived from said at least one original analog form, which causes a second loss of information in the digital register; compare the digital record with the original digital representation to determine the degree of dissimilarity between the digital record made and the original digital representation; and use the degree of dissimilarity that is equal to th...

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2005

Text Retrieval Conference, 1999

IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 2001

Information retrieval can be seen both as an inference process under uncertainty involving comple... more Information retrieval can be seen both as an inference process under uncertainty involving complex relationships between information items, and as a task of proper assessment of uncertainty. Probabilistic argumentation systems are a technique for reasoning under uncertainty which emphasize both aspects, by clearly distinguishing the qualitative and quantitative aspects of uncertainty. This paper presents the use of probabilistic argumentation systems for (1) taking into account hypertext links in order to improve an initial ranking of documents and (2) considering statistical similarities between query terms to improve their weighting. These two applications can be easily integrated in a retrieval system based on term matching.

CARLOS A. ALVARENGA Accenture When did we start worrying about the origin of products we consume?... more CARLOS A. ALVARENGA Accenture When did we start worrying about the origin of products we consume? Ethical, safety, and environmental concerns about products may seem to be a recent development—one that coincides with the acceleration of globalization. Yet a bit more than two hundred years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, contemporaries of Voltaire were shocked to learn how brutally supply chains of the time often operated: “it is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe,” says the maimed slave to Voltaire’s Candide. Receding further, one finds the famous German Law on Beer Purity—restricting the allowed ingredients in the production of beer to water, barley, and hops—which dates from 1516 and is still in existence today. Yet our interest in product authenticity is probably even older: in ancient Rome, for example, fraudulent wine was common and seals were faked to pass lower-grade Gallic wine off as more costly Roman wine.

In many applications, users specify target values for certain attributes/features without requiri... more In many applications, users specify target values for certain attributes/features without requiring exact matches to these values in return. Instead, the result is typically a ranked list of the top k objects that best match the specified feature values. User subjectivity is an important aspect of such queries, i.e., which objects are relevant to the user and which are not depends on the perception of the user. Due to the subjective nature of similarity-based retrieval, the answers returned by the system to a user query often do not satisfy the user's information need right away; either because the weights and the distance functions associated with the features do not accurately capture the user's perception or because the specified target values do not fully capture her information need or both. The most commonly used technique to overcome this problem is query refinement. In this technique, the user provides to the system some feedback on the "relevance" of the...

présentée à la Faculté des sciences pour obtenir le grade de Docteur ès sciences par

2021 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS)

Keywords: IVRG Reference LCAV-CONF-2005-014 Record created on 2005-05-21, modified on 2017-05-12

this paper verifies whether or not hyperlinks improve retrieval effectiveness. In the second chap... more this paper verifies whether or not hyperlinks improve retrieval effectiveness. In the second chapter, we describe experiments on the ad hoc track. In this case, we acknowledge that currently it is becoming more and more difficult to store and manage the growing document collections within a single computer. Recent advances in network technology do however allow us to disseminate information sources by partitioning a single huge corpus (or distributing heterogeneous collections) over a local-area network (Intranet). Most retrieval mechanisms currently proposed however are based on conventional IR models [Salton 89], and where a centralized document collection is assumed.

Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, 2021

Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potenti... more Serialized QR Codes applied to product packaging have received considerable interest as a potential solution to the problem of industrial counterfeiting. Compared to traditional security solutions (e.g. taggants, holograms, security inks), they are indeed simpler to integrate in existing production workflow, easier to verify, and more cost-effective at scale. In addition, they allow to convey a product digital identity and history, and are used to connect brand owners with consumers. However, by itself a QR Code offers no protection at all against copy by cloning. Various schemes have been proposed to add a copy-sensitive layer to QR Codes, but most techniques in the state of the art have not been applied to real production environments, where QR Codes are printed at mass scale and products are scanned in a non-controlled environment, typically by consumers with their smartphones. This paper presents a system based on integrating copy detection patterns into QR Codes, which has been deployed for a number of years on the market.

There is an increasing interest in hypertext systems, digital li braries and the Web. Due to the ... more There is an increasing interest in hypertext systems, digital li braries and the Web. Due to the huge number of pages and links, browsing cannot be viewed as an adequate searching process, even with the introduction of subject directories or other classified lists (e.g., Yahoo!). Therefore, an effective query-based mechanism for accessing information is needed. Nowadays, search engines available on the Web are far from covering all available information, and present many drawbacks. Moreover, most of them ignore hypertext links to enhance their retrieval effectiveness. Recent work in IR on the Web seems to recognize that the hyperlink structure can be very valuable for locating information. This paper exposes some search strategies using hyperlinks. Only a few rigorous experiments deal with such large-sized networked information, and we present some preliminary experiments using a snapshot of around 2.3 Gb extracted from the Web. Our study suggests that the usefulness of interdocumen...

The Internet paradigm permits information searches to be made across wide-area networks where inf... more The Internet paradigm permits information searches to be made across wide-area networks where information is contained in web pages and/or whole document collections such as digital libraries. These new distributed information environments reveal new and challenging problems for the IR community. Consequently, in this TREC experiment we investigated two questions related to information searches on the web or in digital libraries: (1) an analysis of the impact of hyperlinks in improving retrieval performance, and (2) a study of techniques useful in selecting more appropriate text databases (database selection problem encountered when faced with multiple collections), including an evaluation of certain merging strategies effective in producing, single, ranked lists to be presented to the user (database merging problem).

Convergence, National Defense University Press, 2012

Global Enabling Trade Report, World Economic Forum, 2012

The problem of supply chain integrity is an old one in society but a relatively new one in global... more The problem of supply chain integrity is an old one in society but a relatively new one in global supply chain management. Its importance has mounted because of the increasing global reach of brands and the lack of accountability in supply chains that operate in many parts of the world. In the end, the strategic shift is that information regarding the integrity of the product in the future will be provided not by the supply chain but by the product itself. There is now an ecosystem of tracking and communication technologies that has an incredible potential to provide more transparency of supply chains, easier access to information, richer and more granular traceability, enriched communication with consumers, and the ability throughout the supply chain to discern the licit from the illicit.