Using forms for information hiding and coding in electrophotographic documents

Common forensics tasks such as verifying ownership, authenticity, and copyright of a document can be accomplished through the use of imperceptible marks or signatures inserted during the printing process. Prior research has investigated techniques to embed and recover extrinsic information from electrophotographic text documents and halftone images. But in the absence of suitable halftone patches or text characters, another strategy to embed signatures in the document is needed. In this study, the use of the frames or borders that surround the contents of security documents such as bank statements, event tickets and boarding passes is proposed. While this new embedding context broadens the embedding domain, it also offers the possibility of using error-correcting coding techniques from the area of communications. Experimental results show that the addition of coding methods to the embedding scheme improve the embedding capacity and provide more robustness to our system.