Digital Watermarking Method for Printed Materials Embedding in Hue Component

In recent years, a lot of research has been conducted into watermarking for the purpose of protecting the copyright of a variety of electronic content. Very recently, watermarking methods that resist analog conversion, such as that for printing, have been studied and systems have been proposed that provide instructions for converting from analog to digital data, such as those for mobile telephones with cameras. In this paper, by regarding the color assimilation phenomenon, we propose a digital watermark for printed materials in which the watermark data are embedded in the hue component of embedded images. The results of experiments of extracting the watermark from the printed materials by using the scanner indicate that the proposed method is tolerant to digital-to-analog conversion.