Performance comparison of two text marking methods

A text document typically consists of a collection of regular structures such as words, lines, and paragraphs, a slight movement of which seems less perceptible than, say, dithering of the document image. In this paper we exploit this property to watermark formatted text documents by shifting slightly certain lines and words in order to discourage illicit distribution. We analyze two methods for reliable document identification in the presence of severe distortions introduced by photocopying, facsimile transmission, and other processing. The correlation method uses document profiles directly for detection. To eliminate the effect of certain distortions, the centroid method bases its decision on the distances between the centroids of adjacent profile blocks. We present the maximum likelihood detectors for both methods and evaluate their relative performance. Our analysis indicates that line-shift generally has a smaller error than word-shift detection, and that the correlation detector outperforms the centroid detector provided certain distortions can be accurately compensated for before detection is attempted. These results have been applied to implement a marking and identification system and preliminary experimental results have been very promising.