A High Capacity Watermarking Technique for the Printed Document

Digital watermarking technology is an effective method for copyright protection of digital information, such as images, documents, etc. In this paper, we propose a high capacity text image watermarking technique against printing and scanning processes. Firstly, this method obtains the invariant in the process of printing and scanning under the mathematical hypothesis model of print-scan transformation. Then based on the print-scan invariant, the Fourier descriptor is used to flip the trivial pixel points with high frequency information on the character boundary. Next, considering the resolution of the print-scan equipment and its influence on the print-scan invariant, a quadratic quantization function is proposed to embed watermark information of multiple bits for a single character. Finally, the QR code (Quick Response code) is researched, which has large information capacity, robust error correction ability and high decoding reliability. By using the QR code as the watermark information, we can reduce the impact of bit error rate during watermark extraction, and the robustness of the watermark information can be improved. The experimental results show that the proposed text watermarking algorithm has the advantages of anti-print scanning, anti-scaling, large capacity and good visual effects.