Abstract: Method and apparatus for handwriting recognition system for ideographic characters and other characters based on subcharacter hidden Markov models. The ideographic characters are modeled using a sequence of subcharacter models and by using two-dimensional geometric layout models of the subcharacters. The subcharacter hidden Markov models are created according to one embodiment by following a set of design rules. The combination of the sequence and geometric layout of the subcharacter models is used to recognize the handwriting character.

Abstract: The present invention is a method for preventing unauthorized copying and use of information which is stored on a storage medium and for restricting the use of such information to designated devices. Copy protection is achieved by generating a signature from a given storage medium. The signature is derived from an arbitrarily selected list of nonuniformities, uniformities and their attributes. The selected list may contain nonuniformities at any granularity level. As such, this signature is unique to a given storage medium in the same way finger prints are unique to a human being. This signature is used to derive a key for encrypting the information on the storage medium. Any copying of the distribution information from one storage medium to another results in the mutation of the signature required to decrypt the information. Therefore, the present invention obviates the need for introducing artificial indica or requiring a special hardware subsystem for achieving a copy protection scheme.