Stippling data on backgrounds of pages-toward seamless integration of paper and electronic documents

Abstract

In order to realize seamless integration of paper andelectronic documents, it is at least necessary to assure errorfree conversion from one to the other. In general, theconversion from paper to electronic documents is the taskof document image understanding. Although its researchhas made remarkable progress, it is still a hard task withoutlimiting the type of documents. This paper presents acompletely different approach to this task on condition thatprinted documents have their originals in electronic form.The proposed method employs fine dots to represent dataof electronic documents and places the dots on white space(backgrounds) of pages. Since the data is encoded with anerror correcting code, it is guaranteed to be correctly recoveredfrom the scanned images of documents. Experimentalresults show that a page with normal foreground objects(characters and other things) can contain more than 4KB ofdata, even when errors up to 20% of the data are permitted.