Word text watermarking for IP protection and tamper localization

Intellectual property rights protection and authentication of digital content are the increasing major concerns in the current digital era. In this paper, we propose a digital watermarking technique for embedding data in WORD formatted texts by character-shift coding. Several strategies are applied in the system to improve invisibility, security, robustness and tamper localization, such as redundancy embedding, encryption, error correction coding, random position embedding, and human visual systems. Simulation results show that the proposed watermarking system is resilient in face of various format manipulations (such as font type, font size, fond color, underline, and line space) as well as content tampers (such as replacement, insertion and deletion of words and paragraphs). Due to the robustness, tamper localization and high embedding capacity, the scheme can serve the purposes of copyright protection, authentication and tamper detection, and covert communications.