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Payload and Watermarking Trade-Offs in Online Handwriting: A Structured Comparative Study

Volume 11, Issue 4, Page No 1–34, 2026

Author’s Name: Ruben Copado-TorreblancaEmail, Marcos Faundez-Zanuy*Email
Technology Department, Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Mataró (Barcelona), Spain
*whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: faundez@tecnocampus.cat

Adv. Sci. Technol. Eng. Syst. J. 11(4), 1–34 (2026); crossref symbol DOI: 10.25046/aj110401

Keywords: Online handwriting, Digital watermarking, Payload capacity, Signal distortion, Robustness analysis, Biometric security

Received: 2 May 2026, Revised: 23 July 2026, Accepted: 25 July 2026, Published Online: 31 July 2026
(This article belongs to the SP21 (Special Issue on Emerging Multidisciplinary Directions in Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences 2026) & Section Information Systems in Computer Science (CIS))
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Abstract

Online handwriting is a dynamic signal that can support digital watermarking, but existing studies have mainly evaluated individual embedding methods, leaving limited structured evidence on the joint relationship between payload, distortion, robustness, and host-signal characteristics. This paper addresses this gap through a comparative framework that combines cross-dataset host-signal characterization with a controlled evaluation of representative watermarking families. A heterogeneous set of handwriting and signature datasets is characterized in terms of trajectory length, task type, and in-air/on-surface composition. LSB, Difference Expansion, QIM, DCT, DWT, DFT, and SVD are then examined under a common reference setting. Payload is analyzed at method, dataset, and task levels, whereas geometric distortion and robustness are experimentally evaluated on a reference online signature under additive Gaussian noise and low-pass filtering. Within the evaluated framework, the controlled experiment reveals method-dependent payload--distortion--robustness trade-offs, while the cross-dataset analysis shows substantial variation in nominal host-signal support across trajectory structures.

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