Clustered-dot color halftone watermarks using spatial frequency and color separability

A framework for clustered-dot color halftone watermarking is proposed. Watermark patterns are embedded in the color halftone on per-separation basis. For typical CMYK printing systems, common desktop RGB color scanners are unable to provide the individual colorant halftone separations, which confounds per-separation detection methods. Not only does the K colorant consistently appear in the scanner channels as it absorbs uniformly across the spectrum, but cross-couplings between CMY separations are also observed in the scanner color channels due to unwanted absorptions. We demonstrate that by exploiting spatial frequency and color separability of clustered-dot color halftones, estimates of the individual colorant halftone separations can be obtained from scanned RGB images. These estimates, though not perfect, allow per-separation detection to operate efficiently. The efficacy of this methodology is demonstrated using continuous phase modulation for the embedding of per-separation watermarks.