Watermarking Ancient Documents Based on Wavelet Packets

The ancient documents present an important part of our individual and collective memory. In addition to their preservation, the digitization of these documents may offer users a great number of services like remote look-up and browsing rare documents. However, the documents, digitally formed, are likely to be modified or pirated. Therefore, we need to develop techniques of protecting images stemming from ancient documents. Watermarking figures to be one of the promising solutions. Nevertheless, the performance of watermarking procedure depends on being neither too robust nor too invisible. Thus, choosing the insertion field or mode as well as the carrier points of the signature is decisive. We propose in this work a method of watermarking images stemming from ancient documents based on wavelet packet decomposition. The insertion is carried out into the maximum amplitude ratio being in the best base of decomposition, which is determined beforehand according to a criterion on entropy. This work is part of a project of digitizing ancient documents in cooperation with the National Library of Tunis (BNT).