A novel zero-watermarking scheme for text document authentication

Abstract

The demand for copyright protection of text documents is extremely vital especially when the text is transmitted over the Internet. One of the best practical resolutions to maintain the security of document media is digital watermarking. Several approaches have been proposed to guarantee the safety and protection of the documents against dishonest copying and distribution. This paper suggests an innovative zero-watermarking scheme for the purpose of authentication and tamper detection in simple text documents. The algorithm generates a watermark based on the effective characters of the text contents which can be extracted later using extraction algorithm to identify the status of tampering in the text document. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm against random tampering attacks. Watermark pattern matching and watermark distortion rate are used as evaluation parameters on multiple text samples of varying length.