The Certimark Consortium consists of 15 partners from European industry and academia. The consortium has been developing a benchmark suite that will enable its users to evaluate digital watermarking technologies. Here, we present the basic architecture of the benchmark suite and its underlying rationale. We also provide an outlook on future plans for making the benchmark suite available outside the consortium and for its further development.

An object recognition system based on the dynamic link architecture, an extension to classical artificial neural networks (ANNs), is presented. The dynamic link architecture exploits correlations in the fine-scale temporal structure of cellular signals to group neurons dynamically into higher-order entities. These entities represent a rich structure and can code for high-level objects. To demonstrate the capabilities of the dynamic link architecture, a program was implemented that can recognize human faces and other objects from video images. Memorized objects are represented by sparse graphs, whose vertices are labeled by a multiresolution description in terms of a local power spectrum, and whose edges are labeled by geometrical distance vectors. Object recognition can be formulated as elastic graph matching, which is performed here by stochastic optimization of a matching cost function. The implementation on a transputer network achieved recognition of human faces and office objects from gray-level camera images. The performance of the program is evaluated by a statistical analysis of recognition results from a portrait gallery comprising images of 87 persons.>