From Hieroglyphs To Xerox Glyphs

By Roland Piquepaille

Researchers at Xerox PARC have developed a new way to imbed machine-readable information in printed documents. According to this article from Sci-Tech Today, "Digital Evolution Continues with Xerox Glyphs," their dataglyphs are composed only of forward (/) or backward () slashes -- similar to the zeros and ones used in binary code. These dataglyphs could replace bar codes or be used in faxes, easing the way of routing information in a large company. Xerox is already using these dataglyphs for several projects, including one in Latin America to reduce check fraud. The company also has started an experiment named 'GlyphSeal' for two-sided documents, one for human eyes, and the other for machines. Read more...

Here are some quotes from one of the Xerox PARC researchers, Jeff Breidenbach.

"Under a magnifying glass, you can see that a dataglyph is composed of hundreds or thousands of tiny diagonal lines, leaning either forwards or backwards," said Xerox PARC research scientist Jeff Breidenbach. "Diagonal lines tend to unobtrusively blend -- and by varying the color and thickness of these marks, we achieve a lot of aesthetic control."

"Dataglyphs are essentially a barcode on steroids," Breidenbach says. "In some ways they are simply more flexible -- much more aesthetically flexible, more resistant to certain types of environmental damage, easier to read on curved surfaces, and more flexible in the quantity of data stored -- from a handful of bytes to tens of kilobytes."

You can create and decode your own dataglyphs by running this demonstration.

Just for fun, I tried it, giving the title of this post as the text to be encoded, "From Hieroglyphs to Xerox Glyphs." On the left is the dataglyph containing this text (Credit: Xerox PARC). Pretty hard to guess, isn't?

You'll find much more information on this technology by reading this technical overview of dataglyphs.

But let's return to Sci-Tech Today for a description of the 'GlyphSeal' experiment ,Breidenbach's favorite application.

A Xerox experiment, GlyphSeal "is a technique for printing a hybrid analog/digital paper document," Breidenbach explained. "The front sides of the paper are human readable, while the reverse sides contain a complete machine-readable digital representation. This allows a document to easily travel from computer system to printout and back again."

The latest research work about GlyphSeal has been published by the Proceedings of SPIE (Volume: 5306, June 2004) under the title "Collocated Dataglyphs for large-message storage and retrieval." Here is a link to the abstract -- a full version in PDF format costs $15. Here is the beginning of the abstract.

In contrast to the security and integrity of electronic files, printed documents are vulnerable to damage and forgery due to their physical nature. Researchers at Palo Alto Research Center utilize DataGlyph technology to render digital characteristics to printed documents, which provides them with the facility of tamper-proof authentication and damage resistance. This DataGlyph document is known as GlyphSeal. Limited DataGlyph carrying capacity per printed page restricted the application of this technology to a domain of graphically simple and small-sized single-paged documents. In this paper the authors design a protocol motivated by techniques from the networking domain and back-up strategies, which extends the GlyphSeal technology to larger-sized, graphically complex, multi-page documents.

Xerox PARC has a long history of good ideas that never been commercially successful -- at least for Xerox. Will these dataglyphs become a hit or a flop? Time will tell.

Sources: Mike Martin, Sci-Tech Today, January 21, 2005; and various websites

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