Halftone primitive watermarking and related applications
First Claim
1. A method of embedding a watermark into a halftone image, said method comprising:
- providing a watermark to alter the halftone dots by toggling boundary pixels of the halftone dots, wherein the halftone dots are represented as primitives comprising contiguous clusters of halftone pixels; and
embedding the watermark in the image by growing or shrinking the primitives through the toggling of the boundary pixels.
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Abstract
The present invention relates to a method for embedding a digital watermark into a halftone image comprised of clusters of halftone dots, which are referred to as geometric primitives. This method embeds a watermark image signal including an array of multilevel per pixel delta values by increasing or decreasing the size of a corresponding cluster of halftone dots. In particular, each delta value represents a change in luminance in one implementation, but this delta value could correspond to other color planes of a monotone or color halftone image. The watermark embedder subtly changes the halftone primitives by toggling boundary pixels on or off in a manner that grows or shrinks the primitive.
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Citations
5 Claims
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1. A method of embedding a watermark into a halftone image, said method comprising:
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providing a watermark to alter the halftone dots by toggling boundary pixels of the halftone dots, wherein the halftone dots are represented as primitives comprising contiguous clusters of halftone pixels; and embedding the watermark in the image by growing or shrinking the primitives through the toggling of the boundary pixels. - View Dependent Claims (2)
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3. A method of embedding a watermark into a halftone image, said method comprising:
providing a watermark to alter a cluster of halftone dots by toggling boundary pixels of the halftone dots; and
embedding the watermark in the image, including toggling boundary pixels on or off to grow or shrink the halftone dots.
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4. An apparatus to embed a watermark in a halftone image, said apparatus comprising:
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means for receiving an image including primitives comprising contiguous clusters of halftone pixels; and an encoder to toggle halftone data values at an outer boundary of a cluster of halftone pixels of the image, the encoder operable to grow or shrink the cluster at the outer boundary to embed an element of the watermark in the image. - View Dependent Claims (5)
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Specification