Robust Text Watermarking Based on Modifying the Stroke Components of Chinese Characters
Chen Hai, Yanli Chen, Zhicheng Dong, Yongrong Wang, Asad Malik, Hanzhou Wu · IET Image Processing · 2025
ABSTRACT Traditional codebooks used for tracing information leakage in text documents often suffer from limitations in embedding capacity, robustness, and efficiency due to their manual generation process. This paper proposes a robust text watermarking method based on the stroke components of Chinese characters. By designing an innovative approach, Chinese character strokes are divided into several distinct components, with only specific ones being selectively modified to generate new glyphs, thus forming a unique codebook. The watermark signals are embedded by substituting the carrier glyph with the newly generated one, and the signals are extracted using a template matching method. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional manually designed codebooks, the proposed method significantly reduces human labor and computational overhead while maintaining high visual quality. Moreover, it exhibits superior robustness and adaptability across various challenging scenarios, including digital noise attacks, print‐scanning attacks, and print‐camera capture, making it a highly effective solution for protecting textual information.