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Making Visible Watermarks More Effective
- kuschku 9y agoThis is just adding a warping effect, and I’m quite sure that if this technology had already existed, then the same team at Google that did this research would have, with a similar amount of work, been able to circumvent this technique, too. I mean, de-warping warped imagery is something that Google’s image stabilization software used on YouTube can already do very well. Adapting it for this purpose should be possible.
- awaythrow101 9y agoBut wouldn't it require you to find how the target image's particular watermark was warped? None of the other watermarks will have precisely the same warping parameters as that image's watermark. You could attempt to de-warp the watermark in place on the image, but that would seem to be likely to warp the image as well, no?
- woodrowbarlow 9y agoyou could de-warp the watermark in place, and this would warp the image but you could reverse the warp after you're done removing the watermarks.
- pps43 9y agoIf the same watermark is added to each image, then you can estimate the watermark by averaging many images and subtract it to get original image back. If each image has a slightly different watermark, then simple averaging won't work. Instead you need to come up with a model that describes how the watermark is changing, then estimate parameters of that model. The more complex the change, the more images you need for parameter estimation. Image stabilization won't work here because it relies on large features and therefore won't be sensitive to relatively weak watermark signal. Besides, it's only stabilizing in three dimensions (pitch, roll, yaw) and won't help with warping within the image.
- Retric 9y agoAveraging will still provide the average watermark given a large enough sample set. Which is then a single geometric transformation from the used watermark. Estimating that transformation for a specific image should be fairly straightforward as they could easily reverse a watermark that was offset. At which point it's reversible.
- pps43 9y agoNot really, because in each image parts of the watermark will be in different places. You don't even need to warp the watermark to achieve that, it's enough to randomly reposition it.
- Retric 9y agoSupose you have 4 points on a box. If you randomly increase or decrease the location of each point by some random value say +-3% then averaged 100,000 of those boxes, you get a smaller box(1) surrounded by a larger increasingly blurry box. This is true even if no single picture shows that single smaller box, but it will show up on the average. (1) Rather than a true box the midpoints are going to be slightly buldging, but with a large sample set it's very close to a box. Sure, you can get into cat and mouse games ever stranger geometry. But, the water mark is limited by how much it distracts from the image.
- pps43 9y agoThe article shows the result of this approach, and it clearly does not work well.
- Retric 9y agoAs I said you need a new step: "Estimating that transformation for a specific image should be fairly straightforward". It does show a good average and simply moving the watermark was easily reversible suggesting detection of a watermark in an image was easy.
- AndrewCHM 9y agostraightening a plane e.g. a whole video frame, is a bit different from removing a random warp on a watermark (where the warp is more complex than tilting/angling the watermark), while its overlaid with partial visibility on a non-warped image
- ouid 9y agoSeems like it is saying the following: We can find the watermark in images and subtract it from the image. If we distort the original watermark, but subtract the average watermark, then you will not recover the original image. duh?
- fake-name 9y agoThe point of the article is that, for sites with a huge image corpus, if they apply some randomization to the watermark for every image, it's much more challenging to recover a un-marked image. Right now, sites like shutterstock and other image sites apply the same watermark to every image, making it quite easy to computationally extract the watermark, and then apply the inverse transform to marked images. If the watermark is permuted on a per-image basis, it becomes much harder, since you can't extract the watermark from a single image.
- nxsynonym 9y agoThinking out loud here - but would this be a good use case for blockchain technology? The problem with visible watermarks is it detracts from the image visibility. Nobody wants to look at photos or digital art pieces with huge ugly watermarks on them. Could blockchain tech help establish ownership in a way that would make watermarking obsolete? edit: cool - downvotes for asking a question. Real nice guys.
- throwasehasdwi 9y agoProbably not but I was thinking either ML or VR could help
- sly010 9y agoYou meant AI...
- throwaway91111 9y agoML is a real thing, unlike AI. No clue where the VR came from.
- vxNsr 9y agoHe's trying to synergize his core competencies to get an MVP using his AR/VR play.
- kyle-rb 9y ago>VR Yes, yes, possibly 3D printing as well.
- schoen 9y agoThe visible watermarks primarily aim to deter unauthorized use rather than to prove copyright claims or help people locate a copyright holder. If you want to prove copyright claims, there is a centralized registration system that has existed for over a century https://www.copyright.gov/registration/index.html https://www.copyright.gov/registration/index.html Locating copyright holders is a much thornier problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works but it's not obvious that a decentralized database is more effective somehow than a centralized database.
- user5994461 9y agoWhy do they use transparent watermark????
- grenoire 9y agoIt is not so easy to decide if the watermark covers an important aspect of the photo.
- throwaway91111 9y agoYea, but that may be acceptable for eg previewing a photographer's work—you reach out for the originals.
- bwang29 9y agoI think the question is why would we need protective watermark anyway if stock photo companies are already crawling and sometimes phishing for use of licensed stock photography on the web and then directly send out an DCMA or a charge? I've been in many situations where the copyright owners reached out for damage fees after downloading a full-res, un-watermarked photo from free stock photos sites in blog posts, so I'm sure the tech is all there already.
- 0942v8653 9y agoWhat if you put it into a video? Photoshop it into a meme? Drop it in to an internal presentation? These are all situations where the copyright of a stock image owner is infringed and yet there is very little that automated processes can do to detect them.
- Fiahil 9y agoWhat is the issue with dropping copyrighted images into internal presentations ?
- gknoy 9y agoIf I put a copyrighted image into an internal presentation, I am still copying and redistributing this image. Without permission to do so, that seems like it's straight-up infringement. I don't believe it usually meets the criteria for fair use, either.
- Fiahil 9y agoSure, I do that all the time. But, two things to consider: 1) No one outside of the 5 people attending the presentation will ever know. The 5 colleagues following the presentation absolutely don't care where the images are coming from, as long as the point is clear and I'm speaking loud enough. 2) Redistributing ? Really ? If I'm sending a cat picture to my mom, my manager or my favorite slack channel, I'm "redistributing" ? Come on. It's not a publicly available blog post, it's my inner social circle. I'm never going to pay $30 for the few images I used to make my presentation less boring. However, I can make a little effort and put a 12pt "credits" slide at the end (usually, no one care about).
- Ajedi32 9y agoI wonder if removing watermarks from images would be something a machine learning algorithm would be well suited for. Admittedly my understanding of machine learning is rather limited, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to generate a large training set of watermarked and unwatermarked images for the algorithm to train on. No idea how effective it'd be though.
- dtech 9y agoIf you read the blog post, they link to their own research that does exactly that.
- Ajedi32 9y agoCould you show me where? I saw nothing in that article mentioning machine learning or deep learning specifically, and the paper the blog post is based on seems to use non-ML based techniques. My assumption is that a deep learning algorithm trained on multiple different styles and variations of watermarked images would be much more robust to the sort of changes Google proposed in this blog post as a way to defeat their existing algorithms.
- sp332 9y agoNot all machine learning is "deep neural networks". I think that's why your comment is being downvoted. The video shows specific model parameters that are learned for each watermark.
- Ajedi32 9y agoYes, apologies for being imprecise in my wording. In this case I am indeed specifically referring to deep neural networks.
- dtech 9y agoIt seems the problem here is that the watermark is transparent, and thus still contains information about the original image. Similar to how if you want to censor a part of an image, you should always use a single solid color because e.g. a blur can be inverted. But I guess that would degrade the quality of the watermarked photo too much.
- tyingq 9y agoPeople do sometimes use small, non transparent watermarks. If they are small enough though, then the person copying just overlays their own. Or uses automated inpainting to approximate what's underneath.
- maturz 9y agoExample of content aware fill for anyone that hasn't seen it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mseebach 9y agoThe watermark has to overlay the important parts of the image (otherwise, overlaying your own watermark, or simply cropping it out, becomes trivial). It has to be transparent, because the purpose of having the image available in the first place is that potential customers must be able to evaluate it for their purposes before purchasing a license for it. Slapping a solid color bar across it makes that quite difficult.
- FTA 9y agoThis reminds me a bit of the common argument for locks: it keeps regular people honest. Watermarks are designed really to deter you from casually copying an image and pasting it on your site, unless you don't care at all about a watermark showing (e.g. a blog site with a few followers). I'm sure a mixture of the original computer vision technique plus some smearing on the original image could wash away even these randomly perturbed watermarks. Just with many other security matters, you will always be trying to stay one step ahead of someone attempting to circumvent protections. So really the best protection against someone removing watermarks is to file a copyright infringement against the infringing party. DMCA (fixed acronym order :]) is a powerful tool in the USA. In either case, this was a neat article.
- overcast 9y agoThis is exactly right, and is also what keeps the casual thief from doing things like copying software. Obviously these can be cracked, but the layman isn't going to deal with, or even know about it. I don't want to get into the "well those people wouldn't have paid for it anyhow" argument. I firmly believe, as much as a hassle as it is, it's preventing proliferation to the masses. Not much to complain about really, we did it to ourselves. Same can be applied to locks on a house. Prevents someone looking to have fun, from just walking into your home. Otherwise it's too much effort. Regarding reporting. I've submitted various copyright claims to Instagram for others using my photography, and they responded quickly. It was a smooth transaction.
- QAPereo 9y agoI think there's this assumption in some quarters that because there is a tradition of very intelligent people, such as MIT alums, knowing how to pick locks that it's essentially a universal skill. I think it also grossly underestimaes the low intelligence, drive, and education of most people who are breaking into a home of an evening. These are people who are most of the time looking for the open window, the unlocked door, or some other sign of carelessness which they can exploit. Like most predators they're not looking to take down the strongest or the fittest, they're not even looking to take down the average; they're looking for the weak, the sick, the elderly... and they are the biggest victim groups along with criminals themselves. If you didn't have locks, then most people could break into your house without leaving any indication that the home had been broken into except that they had stolen some of your stuff. A lock means that most people have to either crudely force the lock, break a window, break down the door, etc.
- frandroid 9y agoAdd a warped new MD5 for each watermark and they'll never be removable.
- mark-r 9y agoRather than an MD5, put an image ID number in the watermark. Then it serves two purposes.
- miheermunjal 9y agoCould we transform the watermark in randomized distances (X and Y) to avoid the subtraction? If the training on the pattern itself isn't as robust, the method starts to fall apart a bit more.
- cs702 9y agoThe researchers identify the watermarks to be removed by finding pixel patterns that persist across a large number of images, as shown on this animation: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cJwNoUxIBzM/WZTDpw3ru6I/AAAAAAAAB8s/N-KkDRo5NKkoXEqvXOlN1GUEWbpoyyZUQCLcBGAs/s640/image17.gif https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cJwNoUxIBzM/WZTDpw3ru6I/AAAAAAAAB... . Their proposed solution is to randomly warp the watermarks. Unfortunately, their solution could be quickly defeated with image-to-image generative adversarial convnets trained to... remove watermarks from image pairs. (That is, instead of training a model to change, say, image style or resolution, train it to remove artificially added watermarks.)
- gburt 9y agoThese seems likely to me too, but until someone demonstrates it, I'm less certain. GANs are notoriously unstable and it is still quite hard to produce useful models with them.
- HappyTypist 9y agoSounds like we need an adversarial convent for creating watermarks.
- whipoodle 9y agoHeck, I was just impressed by the clever method of removing watermarks. (I mean, if you think about machine learning more than I do, it probably doesn't seem very clever. But I thought it was.)
- droidist2 9y agoDidn't Google invent this watermark defeating mechanism? So they're proposing protection against an attack they created?
- firefoxd 9y agoSometimes the problem is that you just can't know the copyright on an image. I'll push for this again, https://github.com/ibudiallo/imgcopyright https://github.com/ibudiallo/imgcopyright Html has a lot of meta attribute, why not one for copyright.
- chii 9y agohow can the copyright be verifiable? If somebody copied an image, then put _their own_ copyright attribute on it, who becomes the responsible party when a lawsuit happens when that image is misused? Bits have no color.
- avian 9y agoA much better place for such a tag IMHO is in the EXIF block. In fact, such a "copyright" EXIF tag already exists, but isn't commonly used or recognized on the web. Verifiability question remains though. I wonder if some kind of a decentralized system could be made to automatically register published images, so that first registration could be reliably proven. Not that first publication equates to copyright, but that would solve part of the problem.
- mseebach 9y agoI wonder if this approach can be combined with "deep photo style transfer" to make a watermark that is clearly visible to human eyes, but is specifically permuted and adapted to the target image, in a way that it both appears to "belong" in the image (and thus is less disruptive for the legitimate purposes of evaluating images for suitability), but also destroys enough of the original image data to be impossible to remove without significantly and visibly altering the image? https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/18/deep-photo-style-transfer/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/18/deep-photo-style-transfe...
- jansho 9y agoNice. I wonder though, will the randomly placed watermarks distract the legit viewer, and affect their judgment of the images? Example: When I go through Adobe stock photos, although I find the watermark initially annoying, I would quickly learn to "unsee" it in the next photos because I know how it looks like and where it is on the photo. With varied watermarks, I'm not sure if the same mental technique can be applied. Shrugs, I may just be overthinking it.
- molmalo 9y agoHonest question: Recently I took a 6 weeks vacation. One of my cameras had a dust particle that resulted in several thousand pics having a semi translucent watermark-like impression. I think that the process shown here to defeat those watermarks would be ideal to batch-correct my pictures. (As of now, I have to manually correct the ones I love and leave the others as they are). Does anyone happen to know a tool that would allow me to do something like that? As I remember, the same thing happened in one of my friend's wedding. The photographer they hired had one of his lenses with dust, spoiling a lot of pictures... It would be a really nice tool for those situations if they release that code.