Text data-hiding for digital and printed documents: theoretical and practical considerations

In this paper, we propose a new theoretical framework for the data-hiding problem of digital and printed text documents. We explain how this problem can be seen as an instance of the well-known Gel’fand-Pinsker problem. The main idea for this interpretation is to consider a text character as a data structure consisting of multiple quantifiable features such as shape, position, orientation, size, color, etc. We also introduce color quantization, a new semi-fragile text data-hiding method that is fully automatable, has high information embedding rate, and can be applied to both digital and printed text documents. The main idea of this method is to quantize the color or luminance intensity of each character in such a manner that the human visual system is not able to distinguish between the original and quantized characters, but it can be easily performed by a specialized reader machine. We also describe halftone quantization, a related method that applies mainly to printed text documents. Since these methods may not be completely robust to printing and scanning, an outer coding layer is proposed to solve this issue. Finally, we describe a practical implementation of the color quantization method and present experimental results for comparison with other existing methods.