Nondestructive Readout of Copyright Information Embedded in Objects Fabricated with 3-D Printers

摘要

We studied a technique to protect the copyrights of digital data for 3-D printers to prevent illegal products from being fabricated with 3-D printers, which has become a serious economic problem. We previously proposed a technique that could be used to check whether illegal acts had been committed by embedding copyright information inside real objects fabricated with 3-D printers by forming fine cavities inside them and nondestructively reading the information out. We demonstrated that the proposed technique was feasible in practice. We examined a new method of nondestructive readout in this study by using thermographic movie files where the binary images of individual frames were summarized to amplify the signals of the cavity patterns and demonstrated the feasibility of automatic readout with 100% accuracy in reading out embedded information.