Document Watermarking via Text Dimension Perturbation
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing technologies lack effective methods to identify and trace the source of leaked sensitive documents within organizations, leading to potential reputational and financial losses.
Innovation Solution
A system that encodes a user identifier into the renderable dimensions of text elements within a document, allowing for the detection and tracing of the document's source upon leakage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If user identifiers are embedded in documents to enable source tracing, then document security and traceability are improved, but document complexity and processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent embeds user identifiers within the dimensional parameters of text elements, nesting the identification data inside the existing document structure. The identifier is encoded in the renderable dimensions of text elements, allowing the document to contain traceability information without adding separate external structures.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent modifies the dimensional parameters of text elements (height, width, position) to encode user identifier information. By changing these physical parameters slightly, the system embeds identification data that can be extracted later without fundamentally altering the document's content or structure.
2Measurement precision
If text element dimensions are modified to encode user identifiers, then source identification capability is improved, but text rendering precision and readability may deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies dimensional modifications locally to specific text elements rather than uniformly across the entire document. Each text element's dimensions are adjusted based on the encoding requirements, allowing precise identifier embedding while maintaining overall document readability and visual quality.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent modifies only the necessary dimensional parameters of text elements just enough to encode the identifier information, rather than completely transforming the text rendering. This partial modification approach maintains readability while achieving the encoding objective.
3Reliability
If user identifiers are encoded into renderable dimensions, then unauthorized disclosure tracing is improved, but document processing time and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent encodes user identifiers into document text elements during the initial document creation or distribution phase, rather than requiring analysis at the time of leak detection. This preliminary encoding action eliminates the need for complex real-time analysis when a leak is suspected.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a dimensional copy of the user identifier information embedded within the text element dimensions. The identifier is encoded as dimensional variations that can be quickly read and extracted, functioning as a compact copy of the identification data within the document structure.
Data Source
AI summary
Described are methods and system that digitally watermark documents using an encoding scheme that embeds unique identifiers into the files by perturbing the relative heights of words to create patterns that are imperceptible to the human eye but decodable to recover the identifiers. The unique identifiers can be precoded before they are embedded in the documents.