Imprinto: Enhancing Infrared Inkjet Watermarking for Human and Machine Perception
This addresses the need for hybrid paper interfaces that combine tangibility with digital interactivity without visual clutter, though it is incremental as it builds on existing watermarking methods.
The paper tackled the problem of embedding invisible content in paper documents without affecting aesthetics by developing Imprinto, an infrared inkjet watermarking technique using off-the-shelf IR inks and a camera, which was validated through a psychophysical experiment and a machine learning pipeline for detection.
Hybrid paper interfaces leverage augmented reality to combine the desired tangibility of paper documents with the affordances of interactive digital media. Typically, virtual content can be embedded through direct links (e.g., QR codes); however, this impacts the aesthetics of the paper print and limits the available visual content space. To address this problem, we present Imprinto, an infrared inkjet watermarking technique that allows for invisible content embeddings only by using off-the-shelf IR inks and a camera. Imprinto was established through a psychophysical experiment, studying how much IR ink can be used while remaining invisible to users regardless of background color. We demonstrate that we can detect invisible IR content through our machine learning pipeline, and we developed an authoring tool that optimizes the amount of IR ink on the color regions of an input document for machine and human detectability. Finally, we demonstrate several applications, including augmenting paper documents and objects.