Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

research.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 98 posts

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#2

Post by kuschku »

This 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#3

Post by ouid »

Seems 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?

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#4

Post by nxsynonym »

Thinking 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#5

Post by throwasehasdwi »

nxsynonym wrote: post #4

Thinking 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.

Probably not but I was thinking either ML or VR could help

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#6

Post by awaythrow101 »

kuschku wrote: post #2

This 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 possibl…

But 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?

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#7

Post by fake-name »

ouid wrote: post #3

Seems 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?

The 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#9

Post by pps43 »

kuschku wrote: post #2

This 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 possibl…

If 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#10

Post by schoen »

nxsynonym wrote: post #4

Thinking 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.

The 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

Locating copyright holders is a much thornier problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works

but it's not obvious that a decentralized database is more effective somehow than a centralized database.

Post reply on HN