Invisible Graffiti on Your Buildings: Blind and Squaring-Proof Watermarking of Geographical Databases.

Due to the ease of digital copy, watermarking is crucial to protect the intellectual property of rights owners. We propose an effective watermarking method for vectorial geographical databases, with the focus on the buildings layer. Embedded watermarks survive common geographical filters, including the essential squaring and simplification transformations, as well as deliberate removal attempts, e.g. by noise addition, cropping or over-watermarking. Robustness against the squaring transformation is not adressed by existing approaches. The impact on the quality of the datasets, defined as a composition of point accuracy and angular quality, is assessed through an extensive series of experiments. Our method is based on a quantization of the distance between the centroid of the building and its extremal vertex according to its orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]