Digital image watermarking is increasingly critical in media contexts, as emerging regulations and industry practices require marking AI-generated content and ensuring traceable sources to prevent man...
arXiv:2608. 10166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital watermarking has emerged as a critical technique for provenance and copyright attribution in AI-generated imagery, yet its robustness against realistic, model-agnostic removal attacks remains poorly explored.
FeatMark is a watermarking framework that protects images from text‑to‑image diffusion model mimicry attacks by embedding small, scene‑consistent micro‑features instead of pixel‑level perturbations. It constructs domain‑specific feature banks, selects executable features, and injects them via mask‑guided concept editing to create highly localized, natural edits. Experiments on VGGFace2, CelebA‑HQ, and WikiArt show FeatMark remains robust against ten strong watermark removal attacks and several adaptive attacks, with minimal impact on perceptual quality and extending to video mimicry scenarios.
Text-to-image diffusion models enable data-efficient "mimicry" attacks, wherein adversaries fine-tune the model on a handful of public photos to synthesize convincing forgeries of a target individual....
arXiv:2609.39623v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of high-fidelity generative editing models has made it possible to inject violent or sexual content into otherwise ordinary images wh...
The paper introduces the first systematic robustness benchmark for local invisible image watermarking, evaluating five methods across 55 image transformations that include signal distortions, coordinate misalignments, indirect local edits, and direct watermark edits. Results show that all methods are vulnerable to some transformation, with MaskWM achieving the best payload recovery and localization but at the cost of image quality. The study highlights that robustness varies strongly with transformation type, especially noting that geometric misalignment and generative local edits can completely disrupt payload recovery.
arXiv:2511. 04949v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rapid advances in generative AI have led to increasingly realistic deepfakes, posing growing challenges for law enforcement and public trust.
COVER is a new video watermarking method that targets codec compression as its primary design goal. It embeds the watermark payload in the latent space of a frozen generative video autoencoder and recovers it by re‑encoding the received video into the same latent space. Using a differentiable codec surrogate bank, COVER achieves high bit accuracy across multiple codecs while keeping marked videos visually close to the originals.
The paper introduces VeriFi, a watermarking framework that protects face images from AI‑generated manipulation. It embeds a compact semantic latent watermark to preserve content, localizes pixel‑level edits without explicit payloads, and simulates realistic deepfake attacks to improve robustness. Experiments on CelebA‑HQ and FFHQ show that VeriFi outperforms existing methods in robustness, localization accuracy, and recovery quality.
The paper introduces the concept of watermark laundering, where an attacker uses a single reconstruction prompt on public foundation image models to produce a visually faithful output that renders invisible watermarks undecodable. The authors evaluate this failure mode across six OpenAI and Google image editing models, three watermarking schemes, and 1,800 reconstructions, finding that OpenAI models cause the strongest payload disruption while Nano Banana 2 shows vulnerability of DwtDct under high-fidelity reconstruction. Prompt ablation experiments reveal that the disruption is driven by the reconstruction pathway itself rather than any specific removal instruction, highlighting prompt-conditioned reconstruction as a distinct attack interface.
arXiv:2602. 09611v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Watermarking has emerged as a pivotal solution for content traceability and intellectual property protection in large vision language models (LVLMs).
arXiv:2609.31558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has emerged as a dominant vision backbone due to its strong transferability and zero-shot capabilities....