Information Hiding Based on the Artificial Fiber Pattern with Improved Robustness against Foregound Objects

Digital watermarks provide the capability to insert additional information onto various media, such as still images, movies, and audio, by utilizing features of the content. Several methods that use features of the content, such as text or images, have already been proposed for printed documents. To overcome the disadvantages of the existing methods, we have proposed a new information hiding scheme for printed documents, namely, an artificial fiber pattern that uses the features of the medium (e.g., paper) instead of those of the content. The proposed method has features of rotational invariance, low visibility of the hidden information, independence on printer and scanner and robustness against physical attacks. In this paper, we improve the algorithm that verifies the robustness against the foreground by using an artificial color pattern.