Analog image backup with steganographic halftones
Robert A. Ulichney, Ingeborg Tastl, Eric Hoarau · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
Hardcopy (analog) backup of photographs is an important addition to digital storage. It offers a means to visually enjoy the "storage format" decoupled from a digital storage media which can have a shorter archival life than hardcopy, along with shorter lifetime of hardware support. The paper describes a means to eliminate the need to include unsightly text that is part of earlier solutions by embedding all required metadata in a small steganographic halftone with the print. The solution works with any image scanner, which we can safely assume will be available far into the future, when readers of today's digital storage media will be long gone. Examples of the resulting archival compositions and metadataembedded halftones are included.