Scanned binary image watermarking based on additive model and sampling

• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-014-2124-x
• Publication Date: 2014-06-25T04:18:49Z
• Authors: Qingzheng Hou; Dai Junping; Li Li; Jianfeng Lu; Chin-Chen Chang
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Binary image watermarking technology has been the foundation of other anti-counterfeiting techniques such as anti-counterfeit of digital documents and commercial bills and so on. However, researches had been done to hide important data in color image and grayscale image but not enough on binary image. This paper proposes a novel watermarking technique for binary images. First, a binary image is split into multiple thumbnails using a perimeter expansion and sampling operation. Then, the watermarking information is embedded by flipping pixels in the thumbnails to change the number of black pixels. Finally, the watermarked binary image is produced by inverse sampling the thumbnails. The binary image expansion and sampling operation can also be used on a printed and scanned binary image, where the watermarking information is extracted by comparing the difference between the number of black pixels in the thumbnail and the mean value. The experimental results showed that the proposed method is robust to the printing and scanning process.