A novel technique for the watermarking of symbolically compressed documents

Symbolic compression is a lossy compression technique which has been found to perform very efficiently for Indian language text document images. A novel and efficient watermarking technique is proposed for such documents compressed symbolically. The approach embeds the watermark into prototypes which are unaffected during compression, leading to an exact recovery of the watermark both from the compressed document and the reconstructed one. The watermark is perfectly resistant to JPEG conversion and reasonably resistant to other attacks. The proposed technique, for the first time, combines the compression and watermarking of Indian language text document images in a common framework