High Capacity Information Hiding in Music Scores

Intellectual property rights (IPR) management is an important issue for everybody dealing with digital distribution of data. Especially the protection of music scores is essential for publishers who want to distribute their music sheets via Internet. Scanned music scores are a media type publishers are interested in. Classical raster-oriented watermarking schemes cannot be applied directly for music scores because most of them embed a watermark in the frequency domain. The reason for this is the fact that watermarks for music scores must be robust against greyscale to binary conversion. We present an extension of a binary watermarking technique which creates a high capacity information channel for embedding data while limiting the degradation of the watermarked music scores. Thus watermarked music scores are still valuable for musicians and publishers. Limiting the degradation is done by using only certain symbols (horizontal line segments) for embedding the watermark.