Synthesizing Glyph Vectors for Practical Information Hiding in Documents
Xi Yang, Jie Zhang, Chang Liu, Han Fang, Zehua Ma, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu · IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing · 2025
Documents are ubiquitous vehicles for information transmission. Beyond the visible content meant for reading, there is a growing interest in hiding additional information in documents. Recent studies have focused on the utilization of glyphs, which are stored in vector format within computer systems. Specifically, glyph variants are manually designed to substitute the original ones in documents, thereby representing information. However, such strategies are costly, only effective for specific font types, and fragile to physical distortions. To address these limitations, this paper presents AutoStegaFont+, a two-stage and dual-modality learning framework designed to synthesize glyph vectors capable of conveying hidden information under real-world distortions. In the first stage, we jointly train an encoder and a decoder with a specialized distortion layer to achieve robust information encoding and decoding of glyph images. Then, the second stage employs a differentiable rasterizer to transfer the information from encoded glyph images to corresponding vectors, enabling the automatic generation of encoded vectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robust performance of AutoStegaFont+ across a variety of real-world scenarios, including screenshots, print-camera shooting, and screen-camera shooting, while maintaining compatibility with diverse font types. Additionally, we investigate the information-carrying capacity of individual glyphs, exploring their impact on robustness and visual quality.