Recognition of Watermark Dot Information from a Folded, Rumpled, or Waved Paper

Abstract

In the late years, personal information must be protected at the agency in the field of insurance. We develop an agency contract system that protects personal information of the contractor and information to confirm intention to contract by background texture watermarks. When the contractor carries an application form, it may be folded, rumpled, or waved little. In this case, contractor's information must be recognized from background watermarks printed on the application form. But it cannot be recognized surely folded, rumpled, or waved application form by the conventional method. In this paper, we propose a new recognition of watermark dot information from folded, rumpled, or waved application form. The new recognition is composed of crooked point sequence recognition expressing character borders by searching around calculated point, and dot recognition by shading folded, rumpled, or waved paper and emphasizing dot in luminosity from this paper. As a result, we got correct recognition ratio of more than 99% from folded, rumpled, or waved paper. C⃝ 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn, 99(11): 43-55, 2016; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).