Existing file protection approaches and the applications are suitable for the users who own one single device but not the users with multiple devices. A novel mechanism is proposed that provides an efficient and fast cryptographic-based protection approach for files in an appointed directory called safe directory. The highlights are its ability to protect sensitive files automatically in a short time and the support for secure file sharing across devices. All operations in the safe directory are monitored in real time and the files in the directory are protected automatically. Experimental results show that proposed mechanism performs well in performance.

A robust method of identifying and linking footnote and its reference in the text is proposed to solve the footnote recognition problem. Novel features of the footnote, including page layout, font information, lexical and linguistic features, are utilized for the task. Clustering is adopted to handle the features which vary in different kinds of documents but stable within one document so that the process of identification is adaptive with document types. In addition, this method leverages results from the matching process to provide feedback to the identification process and further improves the algorithm accuracy. The primary experiments in real document sets show that the proposed method is promising to identify footnote in a PDF document.

After reviewing the merits and drawbacks of the existing ToC ( table of contents) recognition methods, the authors describe an automatic ToC recognition method with high efficiency and adaptability. Based on style consistency of ToC in book documents, this method employs clustering to detect decorative elements and to generate an adaptive ToC model which can be used to extract ToC entries and their hierarchies. Experimental results show that this method achieves high accuracy and efficiency. Especially, it performs well in processing complicated ToC with decorative elements, broken lines and various hierarchical structures. This method has been successfully applied in a commercial E-book production line.

Binding digital license to a unique identification of hardware configuration of the rendering device is the most popular strategy adopted in current digital rights management. But the main drawback of this scheme is that the protected content cannot be rendered any more once the user replaces any part of the hardware. By encrypting the digital content, splitting the decryption key into multiple pieces and binding them each to different hardware components of the machine, the authors propose a hardware adaptive copyright protection mechanism for digital contents. With this scheme, a buyer can change the hardware configuration of his machine within a determinate range without influencing the use of the bought digital content. Meanwhile, copyright of the content is properly protected.