A high-capacity annotation watermarking scheme

Abstract

Annotation watermarking is a technique that allows to associate textual annotations with digital images in a format independent manner. The embedded annotations are robust against common image processing operations which makes it a convenient tool for knowledge transfer. In this paper, we present a new approach to annotation watermarking. Our scheme resembles a traditional packet network and adopts the fountain coding paradigm for encoding the watermark payload. In our study, we focus on high capacity annotations which is a challenging goal when robustness against popular image processing operations is required. The presented scheme is robust against cropping and lossy JPEG compression. The paper describes the principles of the proposed approach and presents the results of it's experimental evaluation. In particular, we assess the achievable capacity, robustness and the image quality impact. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.