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Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

research.googleblog.com

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Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#51

Post by Fiahil »

gknoy wrote: post #47
Fiahil wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the issue with dropping copyrighted images into internal presentations ?

If 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.

Sure, 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).

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#52

Post by mtmail »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #50
FTA wrote: post #19

This 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 ran…

Whenever they tell me my smart lock can be hacked I respond... "yeah, and someone can also just take a brick, smash my window, and go through that way."

You'll notice the broken window. Your insurance will see the evidence and pay up. Much harder to prove somebody messed with a smart lock.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#53

Post by woodrowbarlow »

awaythrow101 wrote: post #6
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?

you 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#54

Post by throwaway2016a »

mtmail wrote: post #52
throwaway2016a wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever they tell me my smart lock can be hacked I respond... "yeah, and someone can also just take a brick, smash my window, and go through that way."

You'll notice the broken window. Your insurance will see the evidence and pay up. Much harder to prove somebody messed with a smart lock.

Security works best in layers.

My origional comment might be a bit simplistic because In my case in order to not be caught they would have to hack not just my lock but also have to hack my security system network (separate from my home Wifi) and disable the alarms and camera.

But you're right not everyone has layers.

Although one could argue a traditional non-smart lock is not hard to "hack" and leave no evidence either.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#55

Post by nilknarf »

FTA wrote: post #19

This 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 ran…

It's pretty hard to fully protect in the first place because someone desperate enough can always inpaint (aka content-aware fill) over the watermark. Project Naptha has a pretty nice web demo showing how well that works for erasing text from images: https://projectnaptha.com/

Off-topic: Can you fill out your profile? I am not active on HN but I sometimes go by the initials fta elsewhere

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#56

Post by jakob223 »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #50
FTA wrote: post #19

This 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 ran…

Whenever they tell me my smart lock can be hacked I respond... "yeah, and someone can also just take a brick, smash my window, and go through that way."

But a malicious person in Guatemala would have to first fly to wherever you live, then throw a brick individually through each window they wanted to break. With smart locks, that same individual can throw tens of thousands of bricks through tens of thousands of windows without even leaving their desk.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#57

Post by kyle-rb »

throwasehasdwi wrote: post #5
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

>VR Yes, yes, possibly 3D printing as well.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#58

Post by throwaway2016a »

jakob223 wrote: post #56
throwaway2016a wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever they tell me my smart lock can be hacked I respond... "yeah, and someone can also just take a brick, smash my window, and go through that way."

But a malicious person in Guatemala would have to first fly to wherever you live, then throw a brick individually through each window they wanted to break. With smart locks, that same individual can throw tens of thousands of bricks through tens of thousands of windows without even leaving their desk.

But what good does that do if they can't then walk through the door?

Also, most smart door locks are operated over a protocol called ZWave which has a limited range. When people talk about smart lock hacking they are usually talking about RF spoofing of the ZWave signal. You can, of course, hack the bridge device if the bridge device is on Wifi.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#59

Post by gburt »

cs702 wrote: post #45

The 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/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…

These 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#60

Post by nulagrithom »

icebraining wrote: post #26
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.

cool - downvotes for asking a question. Real nice guys. I didn't downvote you, but I suspect at this point people are a bit fed up of the constant suggestions of using the Blockchain for everything.

Also, it's applied in completely the wrong way. You don't watermark to prove ownership, you watermark to prevent unpaid use.
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