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Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

research.googleblog.com

91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#91
post #17

It 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.

The 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#92
I 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-transfe...

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#93
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…

Adding to this: the obvious problem with relying on a security system that is difficult for the "casual" exploiter but not for the dedicated exploiter is that it only takes one dedicated exploiter to develop and distributes a tool that casuals can easily use, it's game over. Each casual doesn't have to crack their game's copy prevention, remove watermarks, or discover their DVD's encryption key. They just have to all sit back and wait for the first pro to do it and release a tool. I've worked in software companies where I've questioned the efforts we expended on copy prevention, and it's always "yea this is to deter the casual copier", but it's futile because tools.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#94
Nice. 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#95
post #79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supose 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…

The article shows the result of this approach, and it clearly does not work well.

As 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#96
Honest 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.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#97
post #96

Honest 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…

Maybe having a few evenly, brightly lit photographs would be extremely helpful.

Re: Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

#98
post #96

Honest 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…

Absolutely, that's a great idea.
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