Digital Watermarking Method for Printed Matters Using Deep Learning for Detecting Watermarked Areas

There are some technologies like QR codes to obtain digital information from printed matters. Digital watermarking is one of such techniques. Compared with other techniques, digital watermarking is suitable for adding information to images without spoiling their design. For such purposes, digital watermarking methods for printed matters using detection markers or image registration techniques for detecting watermarked areas are proposed. However, the detection markers themselves can damage the appearance such that the advantages of digital watermarking, which do not lose design, are not fully utilized. On the other hand, methods using image registration techniques are not able to work for non-registered images. In this paper, we propose a novel digital watermarking method using deep learning for the detection of watermarked areas instead of using detection markers or image registration. The proposed method introduces a semantic segmentation based on deep learning model for detecting watermarked areas from printed matters. We prepare two datasets for training the deep learning model. One is constituted of geometrically transformed non-watermarked and watermarked images. The number of images in this dataset is relatively large because the images can be generated based on image processing. This dataset is used for pre-training. The other is obtained from actually taken photographs including non-watermarked or watermarked printed matters. The number of this dataset is relatively small because taking the photographs requires a lot of effort and time. However, the existence of pre-training allows a fewer training images. This dataset is used for fine-tuning to improve robustness for print-cam attacks. In the experiments, we investigated the performance of our method by implementing it on smartphones. The experimental results show that our method can carry 96 bits of information with watermarked printed matters.