A method for extracting watermarks from textured printed documents

In this paper, we propose a method for extracting latent images (watermarks) embedded into a regular (two-dimensional quasi-periodical) texture of printed document image. The method includes the following steps: spectral analysis of the input image, synthesis of Gabor filter bank, multichannel Gabor filtering of the image that forms textural feature fields, and finally, multichannel segmentation of them. A number of examples show the operability and potential effectiveness of the method.