Physical Marker: Revealing Invisible Hyperlinks Hidden in Printed Trademarks

Abstract Embedding links in brand logos is a promising technology, which allows consumers to access the online information of products by capturing physical logo images. Previous physical data hiding methods primarily embed data within cover media in a global manner, making them ineffective for processing brand logos in vector graphics format with a transparent background. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a novel physical deep hiding scheme for invisibly embedding links in printed trademarks. Specifically, the encoder embeds links only into the area of the brand logo under the constraints of a mask, which is generated from the transparency information of the logo image. A background variation distortion is introduced into the distortion layer that approximate practical logo print-camera environments, such that the decoder could be learnt to retrieve the link from the camera-captured logo with various backgrounds. A feature prompt subspace modulator is further proposed and employed in the encoder to enhance the invisibility of the encoded logo pattern and in the decoder to boost hyperlink extraction accuracy. Various experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for embedding links in printed brand logos, which provides reliable extraction accuracy under both simulated and real scenarios.