Loading patent…
AssigneeDigimarc Corporation
InventorsRavi K. Sharma, Tomas Filler, Vojtech Holub, Osama M. Alattar, Hugh L. Brunk, John D. Lord, Geoffrey B. Rhoads, William Y. Conwell, Ajith M. Kamath
Estimating the term…
A plastic item, such as a beverage bottle, can convey two distinct digital watermarks, encoded using two distinct signaling protocols. A first, printed label watermark conveys a retailing payload, including a Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) used by a point-of-sale scanner in a retail store to identify and price the item when presented for checkout. A second, plastic texture watermark may convey a recycling payload, including data identifying the composition of the plastic. The use of two different signaling protocols assures that a point-of-sale scanner will not spend its limited time and computational resources working to decode the recycling watermark, which may lack data needed for retail checkout. In some embodiments, a recycling apparatus makes advantageous use of both types of watermarks to identify the plastic composition of the item (e.g., relating GTIN to plastic type using an associated database), thereby increasing the fraction of items that are correctly identified for sorting and recycling. In other embodiments the plastic item (or a label thereon) bears only a single watermark. A great number of other features and arrangements are also detailed.
1-145. (canceled)
A recycling system comprising:
A method practiced in a facility in which waste items, including plastic items, are transported on a conveyor belt, the method comprising the acts:
The method of claim 145 that further includes:
The method of claim 145 that further includes estimating a center of gravity of said first plastic item, and controlling a diversion apparatus in accordance with said estimated center of gravity to divert the first item from the conveyor belt and to said first bin.
The method of claim 145 that includes controlling a diversion apparatus in accordance with said first position on the conveyor belt to divert the first item from the conveyor belt and to said first bin.
The method of claim 145 in which said diverting comprises diverting with a stepper motor-controlled arm.
The method of claim 145 in which said diverting comprises diverting with an air jet.
The method of claim 145 that further includes classifying imagery depicting items traveling on the conveyor belt as depicting objects of different classes.
The method of claim 145 in which said received data was data derived from camera-captured imagery.
The method of claim 145 that includes deriving said received data from camera-captured imagery.
The method of claim 145 that includes deriving said received data by decoding plural-bit information from a machine-readable code depicted in camera-captured imagery.
A method comprising the acts:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.