Helpful tool for photographers

We are browsing websites all the time to find useful tools that can help our users to work with their images. Recently we have found some applications that can be worth trying – tools for invisible watermarking, searching for those invisible watermarks online and debluring and denoising images. We are in contact with Filip Krolupper – the leader of developers of those applications so we have asked him several questions.

What is the history of Advanced Photo Tools?
Everything begun with the application SignMyImage 1.0 that was released approx. a year ago. In four months the application got rid of childrens diseases and the version 2.0 was released. In the same time the first version of Image Spider was employed. Image Spider is a web crawler responsible for searching signed images.

In the meantime we developed image denoising tool called DenoiseMyImage.

In this time we have two professional applications and we are about releasing the third application for image debluring – DeblurMyImage.
In the beginning the project was one man show, but now I cooperate with other 3 programmers, who are experts in their area.

Emil – the author and maintainer of Image Spider
Petr – a guy responsible for Mac and Linux versions
Vlado – an author of GPGPU version of DenoiseMyImage

We are mostly located in Prague, Czech Republic, European Union. Emil is from Sweden.

There are some competitive applications, why is SignMyImage better?
SignMyImage allows to sign the photo/image by an invisible watermark and detect the invisible watermark automatically as well. This product was developed primarily for advanced photoamateurs/professionals that earn the money selling their photos. This application is appreciated by people/companies that don’t want to let thiefs download photos from their websites. Moreover we employ web crawler (Image Spider) that crawles the web and searches for signed images. We can say that SignMyImage is cheap equivalent of well known DigiMarc. Here are others rival in this field – Eikonamark, Icemark, Photopatrol.

German prestigious c’t magazine made a comparison between these five programs (incl. SignMyImage). SMI was considered as the second best software. We have to point out that the price of SMI license is a fraction of the others price. For example the price of DigiMarc (the best one) is $500 a year if you want to protect up to 5000 photos. The price of SMI for an unlimited license is 14.99 Euros without paying any annual fee.

What i s the development in the digital watermarking in last few years ?
In this area the number of papers grows rapidly. Here exist at least two conferences with this topics. But honestly, the combination of image scaling/cropping/jpeg compression is deadly. Most papers deal with one of these transformation and don’t care about the others. But all of these appears together in most cases. Lets imagine, if we consider all the transformations, we have no stable information because of crop, we cannot use information based on single pixel because of jpeg, and we don’t know the scale of image. One of the way often followed is probabilistic approach. This approach allows to store information in many instances in every part of the picture. That means if one part is damaged or cropped you can get the information from the rest of the picture.

What technologies are you using?
Our approach is different. We use moments of continuous areas. One of moment is center of gravity. This information is very robust to noise, scaling, jpeg. Unfortunatelly its not robust to crop, so we have the information insert to the image to several different areas.
We cannot forget the second part of the project, that has the same importance. It is Image Spider – our web crawler. It uses wide spectra of technology. It consists of SQL part, PHP frontend, C++ backend, Linux scripting support, SFTP interface …

What is your vision?
The main goal of the SignMyImage is to make Internet safer. We want to help people protect their knowledge, art abilities and skills. We want to help them protect their property rights. In our opinion nobody should be non-punishable, if he steals something what belongs to someone else. Including pictures, images, drawings and photos.

The goal of the ADP Tools group is wider. We are interested in bringing image processing techniques into live. Much theory from image processing is not used in application for photographers. We are going to fill this gap.