Reading watermarks from printed binary images with a camera phone

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method for reading a watermark from a printed binary image with a camera phone. The watermark is a small binary image which is protected with (15, 11) Hamming error coding and embedded in the binary image by utilizing flippability scores of the pixels and block based relationships. The binary image is divided into blocks and fixed number of bits is embedded in each block. A frame is added around the image in order to overcome 3D distortions and lens distortions are corrected by calibrating the camera. The results obtained are encouraging and when the images were captured freehandedly by rotating the camera approximately -2 - 2 degrees, the amount of fully recovered watermarks was 96.3%. © 2009 Springer.