1. TSB / MEDIA Project
Image Processing for digital stores and
Usage tracking

3. Problem
● Cultural Institutions have rich collections of
digital assets, but there are many unknowns
around opening up these assets for public
consumption.
● There is a great deal of [conflicting] pressure
on these institutions to (a) Openly share both
metadata and resources and (b) be come
financially self sustaining

4. MEDIA
● Supports institutions in making informed
choices and supporting their chosen strategy
● From Selling images (Soutron Side)
● Through to watermarking, steganogoraphy
and provenance tracking

5. Vision
● Cloud hosted secured image repository that
can be configured against a host collection
management system after a CC “Paywall”
● Zero local install
● Ability to manage multiple collections and
systems, with differing rules and processes

6. Note
● Following screen captures are a loose
interface on top of MEDIA services
● Our focus has been on configurable parameter
driven adapters that can harvest metadata into
a canonical form for image processing
● The screens represent a [rough] attempt to
visualise how a product might look.

8. Accounts create contexts
Defined by URL
Here – default “admin” context

9. Contexts contain stores, root of URLs
Here /knowledgeintegration context

10. Ingest
● The process of synchronizing the media
repository with a host institutions collections
and digital assets.
● Extensible system of “Connectors” for
extracting image resources and metadata from
a wide range of collection management
systems

11. Stores contain resources,
Define Connectors
Allow resource upload

12. Add connector – Wire this store up
To a collections management system
Or other source

14. Ingest Processing
● Majority of our work here – Flexible (DSL)
driven tool for
– Image format translation
– Image Metadata Generation & Embedding
– Steg Hide Identifiers in Document & Metadata
– Create Variants: Resize, Watermarks, Add
Metadata, Create Thumbs [& Pyramidal Tiffs]
– Record locally and Index for Store
–

15. Stores contain images,
Configure rules,
Define connectors,
Allow individual upload
(Watermarked rezised
thumbs)

17. View original full size - But with full
(Configurable) visible watermark

18. Result of “Purchase” link:
[Really new copy function] - New Copy “Item” [FRBR]
–
Newly minted embedded item copy code [GUID]
No Visible Watermark
Copy/Item specific XMP and EXIF metadata for item
Steg hidden ID of new item
Image is unique to this occurrence of a purchase,
Can be linked back to purchaser
Embedded metadata includes docid – One
Of our toys is an image spider - but Google Search?

19. Use steg information to find original “Buyer”

20. Doc owner tool - System uses steg to extract copied doc ID
and tells us who copied/purchased it originally

21. Unified Searching
Surfacing MEDIA functionality in
end user applications

23. Because properties like price are now user dependent
Physical union catalogues cannot be used here
This tool uses a map-reduce approach to x-search, collating results from
several sources and making use Of web-scale clustered architectures.
Old style x-search did not scale well to cloud infrastructure
(Session pinning problem)

24. Result from soutron – Price per user,
Metadata profile for purchase info
NCMG Result, no buy
But image secured, vis WM, Steg
API At work – Facets, Sort, Cache

28. Other toys
● Spider that finds copies of images
– Even better when google/other engines support
EXIF metadata search
– Still useful concept
– Report on all copies of an image