Data hiding in curves with application to fingerprinting maps

Abstract

This paper presents a new data hiding method for curves. The proposed algorithm parameterizes a curve using the B-spline model and adds a spread spectrum sequence to the coordinates of the B-spline control points. In order to achieve robust fingerprint detection, an iterative alignment-minimization algorithm is proposed to perform curve registration and to deal with the nonuniqueness of B-spline control points. Through experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed data-hiding algorithm against various attacks, such as collusion, cropping, geometric transformations, vector/raster-raster/vector conversions, printing-and-scanning, and some of their combinations. We also show the feasibility of our method for fingerprinting topographic maps as well as writings and drawings.