Inflation of 2D boundary ghosts and digital watermarking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to inflate 2D boundary ghosts with controlled shape and size, which can serve as secure digital watermarks and assist in image reconstruction within specific geometric constraints.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to inflate minimal boundary ghosts by tiling, maintaining perimeter length while varying area, with potential applications in digital watermarking and image reconstruction.

Findings

Large area changes with fixed perimeter length.

Tiling preserves zero projection angles.

Potential use as secure watermarks.

Abstract

Projection ghosts are discrete arrays of signed values positioned so that their discrete projections vanish for some chosen set of n projection angles. Minimal ghosts are designed to be compact, with no internal pixels having value zero. Here we control the shape, number of boundary pixels and area that each minimal ghost encloses. Binary minimal ghosts and their boundaries can themselves be inflated by tiling copies of themselves to make ghosts with larger sizes and different shapes, whilst still retaining the same set of n zero projection angles. The intricate perimeters of minimal ghosts are formed by three strings of connected pixels that are defined by the minimal projection angles. We show that large changes to the ghost areas can be made whilst keeping the length of their segmented perimeters fixed. These inflated boundary ghosts may prove useful as secure watermarks to embed into digital image data. Boundary ghosts may also help guide the selection of angles used to reconstruct images where the object domain is confined to oval shaped arcs.