11–20 of 98 posts
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.
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 wat…
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…
I 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.
I 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'…
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.
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.
I 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'…
Additionally, DMCA is only valid within the United States.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wat…
I wonder what would happen if I took 1000 copies of the same image that is using a warped mark and ran it through the algorithm....