Watermarking Spot Colors in Packaging
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Copyright 2015 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers and IS&T-The Society for Imaging Science and Technology. This paper was published in the proceedings of the 2015 IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging conference: Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics, San Francisco, CA February 8, 2015, volume 9409 and is made available as an electronic reprint with permission of SPIE. Single print or electronic copies for personal use only are allowed. Systematic or multiple reproduction, or distribution to multiple locations through an electronic list server or other electronic means, or duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes is prohibited. By choosing to view or print this document, you agree to all the provisions of the copyright law protecting it. Watermarking Spot Colors in Packaging Alastair Reed, Tomáš Filler, Kristyn Falkenstern, Yang Bai Digimarc Corporation, 9405 SW Gemini Drive, Beaverton, OR 97008, USA ABSTRACT In January 2014, Digimarc announced Digimarc Barcode for the packaging industry to improve the check-out efficiency and customer experience for retailers. Digimarc Barcode is a machine readable code that carries the same information as a traditional Universal Product Code (UPC) and is introduced by adding a robust digital watermark to the package design. It is imperceptible to the human eye but can be read by a modern barcode scanner at the Point of Sale (POS) station. Compared to a traditional linear barcode, Digimarc Barcode covers the whole package with minimal impact on the graphic design. This significantly improves the Items per Minute (IPM) metric, which retailers use to track the checkout efficiency since it closely relates to their profitability. Increasing IPM by a few percent could lead to potential savings of millions of dollars for retailers, giving them a strong incentive to add the Digimarc Barcode to their packages. Testing performed by Digimarc showed increases in IPM of at least 33% using the Digimarc Barcode, compared to using a traditional barcode. A method of watermarking print ready image data used in the commercial packaging industry is described. A significant proportion of packages are printed using spot colors, therefore spot colors needs to be supported by an embedder for Digimarc Barcode. Digimarc Barcode supports the PANTONE spot color system, which is commonly used in the packaging industry. The Digimarc Barcode embedder allows a user to insert the UPC code in an image while minimizing perceptibility to the Human Visual System (HVS). The Digimarc Barcode is inserted in the printing ink domain, using an Adobe Photoshop plug-in as the last step before printing. Since Photoshop is an industry standard widely used by pre-press shops in the packaging industry, a Digimarc Barcode can be easily inserted and proofed. 1. INTRODUCTION In January 2014, Digimarc announced Digimarc Barcode for the packaging industry to improve the check-out efficiency and customer experience for retailers.4 Digimarc Barcode is a machine readable code that carries the same information as a traditional UPC and is introduced by adding a robust digital watermark to the package design. It is imperceptible to the human eye but can be read by a modern barcode scanner at the POS station. Compared to a traditional linear barcode, Digimarc Barcode covers the whole package with minimal impact on the graphic design, and thus eliminates the need to search for the barcode at the checkout. This significantly improves the IPM metric, which retailers use to track the checkout efficiency since it closely relates to their profitability. Increasing IPM by a few percent could lead to potential savings of millions of dollars for retailers, giving them a strong incentive to add the Digimarc Barcode to their packages. Quantitative model of expected savings is available in Ref. 4. Testing performed by Digimarc showed increases in IPM of at least 33% using the Digimarc Barcode, compared to using a traditional barcode.8 Automation and workflow considerations for embedding Digimarc Barcodes at large scale has been presented in Ref. 16. Although digital watermarking is a well-established field with a long list of successful applications5 spanning various media such as audio, video and print, watermarking consumer package goods on a large scale brings new challenges not encountered before. In this paper, we address one such challenge caused by the use of special inks and a barcode imaging system, a case often seen in packaging and retail. Packages are printed with two common ink systems: 1. Process colors – Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK) inks are used to simulate a wide range of colors, by mixing the ink on a substrate and printing half tone dots. This ink system is used in most consumer printers. E-mail: {Alastair.Reed, Tomas.Filler, Kristyn.Falkenstern, Yang.Bai}@digimarc.com; http://www.digimarc.com 2. Spot colors are custom pre-mixed inks designed to achieve a certain color when printed on a specified substrate. The motivation to watermark spot colors is that a significant proportion of packages are printed using spot colors or contain some spot color regions. Packages are often printed with spot colors to reduce cost and for color accuracy and consistency. Other reasons for using spot colors in packaging are to obtain colors outside of the process color gamut, or to create special effects such as fluorescent∗, metallic or optically variable inks.15 Industry standard library of spot inks, published by PANTONE, contains several hundreds of inks. In packaging, Digimarc Barcodes are inserted in the chrominance (as opposed to luminance) domain to obtain the best robustness per unit visibility10 at a spatial frequency corresponding to 75 DPI (Dots Per Inch). The choice of spatial resolution allows Digimarc Barcode to be printed by typical offset and flexographic presses on a range of substrates, and read by modern imaging-based barcode scanners. Modern barcode scanners are monochrome imaging devices typically with red LED illumination. The red LED is a narrow-band light source with a wavelength of 660 nm, which implies that the scanner can only see image content on packages printed with inks that have low reflectivity at this wavelength, such as Cyan or Black. In this paper, we describe a set of algorithms along with working examples of embedding Digimarc Barcode in a package design. In general, the watermark embedding method minimize the visual impact of the added signal while achieving specified signal strength as seen by the POS scanner. This problem is solved for cases involving a mix of process and/or spot colors while considering practical limitations coming from actual presses. The watermark embed method described in Ref. 10 was enhanced to support multiple spot colors and detection with a barcode scanner. The method minimizes the impact on the printer workflow by maintaining colors used in the original design as much as possible. The Digimarc Barcode is inserted in the printing ink domain, using an Adobe Photoshop plug-in as the last step before printing. Since Photoshop is an industry standard widely used by pre-press shops in the packaging industry, a Digimarc Barcode can be easily inserted either internally by the Professional Services Group at Digimarc or externally by a pre-press partner. Standard proofing methods using Photoshop, internal or third party tools can be used to preview the results for visibility and robustness. Due to multidisciplinary nature of this paper, we first describe necessary print and color background in Section 2. Section 3 discusses embed constraints posed by POS scanner and possibly other imaging devices. Watermark embed in process inks and associated challenges are described in Section 4. Section 5 generalizes the embed strategies to handle both process and spot colors. Finally, a brief summary can be found in Section 6. 2. PRINT AND COLOR BACKGROUND This section includes preliminary material required to understand different aspects of color science and printing. Readers familiar with these areas are welcome to skip this section and return back when necessary. Key terms used in the paper are printed in bold. 2.1 Color and Human Visual System As mentioned, Digimarc Barcodes are inserted in the chrominance domain rather than luminance to reduce the visibility of the mark. In this section we briefly describe a few of the fundamental concepts which are used throughout the paper which are related to: color, color spaces and the visibility of color differences. 2.1.1 Color Perception The color of an object is the result of the interaction between a light source, an object and a detector (often the human visual system). Light is radiation which can be seen, in the wavelength range of about 380 to 780 nm. Spectral reflectance is used to describe how an object interacts with light. The spectral reflectance curves describe the fraction of light reflected at each wavelength from the object. When the reflected light is detected and interpreted through the visual system it results in an object having a particular color. The most common way to capture the spectral data with a device is by using a spectrophotometer. ∗Fluorescent inks are used to create eye-catching colors such as Tide orange (www.dayglo.com, en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Tide\_(brand)). Red LED Paper Cyan Magenta Yellow Black 1931 CIE standard observer color matching functions 100% x¯(λ) y¯(λ) z¯(λ) 1.5 75% 1 50% Reflectance 25% 0.5 0% 0 400 450 500 550 600 660 700 400 450 500 550 600 650 700 Wavelength λ nm Wavelength λ nm Figure 1. (Left) Spectral reflectance of PANTONE process inks as measured using X-Rite i1Pro spectrophotometer. Graph also shows spectrum emitted by red LED centered at 660nm. (Right) 1931 CIE 2° standard observer matching functions used for converting spectral reflectance to CIE XYZ color space.