Deep learning-based watermarking has shown strong robustness against non-geometric distortions, yet its performance under geometric transformations remains limited. Such transformations induce two fundamental failure modes: region removal, such as cropping or masking, which eliminates the information carried by removed pixels, and desynchronization, such as scaling or rotation, which misaligns pixel positions and disrupts decoding.
arXiv:2609.40031v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Digital image watermarking is increasingly critical in media contexts, as emerging regulations and industry practices require marking AI-generated co...
By Khaled Abud, Aleksey Yakushev, Aleksandr Akimenkov, Irina Serzhenko, Kirill Aistov, Egor Kovalev, Dmitry Obydenkov, Sergey Lavrushkin, Anastasia Antsiferova, Dmitriy Vatolin, Yury Markin, Kirill Lukianov
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.
By Jie Cao, Qi Li, Zelin Zhang, Xiaodong Wu, Lingshuang Liu, Xiangman Li, Jianbing Ni
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.
By Jidong Yang, Qi Li, Wei Zong, Yang-Wai Chow, Willy Susilo, Huaike Yu, Chunpeng Wang, Suo Gao
IRIS is a training‑free watermarking scheme for diffusion‑generated images that binds a watermark to the image’s visual semantics. It derives an intrinsic ring identifier from a content code of the non‑watermarked image and injects it late in the generation trajectory, ensuring the mark survives common processing while breaking under semantic changes or foreign images. Experiments on three prompt datasets show IRIS reliably detects watermarks, maintains fidelity to the original image, and resists forgery techniques that defeat other marks.
By Xiaoyan Feng, Zheng Gao, Tong Guan, Rui Bao, Bokang Zeng, Xiaoyu Li, Jiaojiao Jiang
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.
By Yuxin Cao, Hao Yang, Ziqi Ding, Jie Hao, Wei Song
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.
By Haoyang Li, Ruoxi Sun, Qingqing Ye, Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao, Yaxin Xiao, Jason Xue, Haibo Hu
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.
By Peipeng Yu, Jinfeng Xie, Chengfu Ou, Xiaoyu Zhou, Jianwei Fei, Yunshu Dai, Zhihua Xia, Chip Hong Chang
arXiv:2607. 26723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inversion-based watermarking is a promising approach to authenticate diffusion-generated images, yet practical use is bottlenecked by inversion that is both slow and error-prone.
By Jindong Yang, Han Fang, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu, Kejiang Chen
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:2608.30656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Proactive tamper localization embeds an imperceptible signal into an image prior to distribution, enabling pixel-level manipulation detection. Existing...
By Suhyeon Ha, Woo Jae Kim, Joonsung Jeon, Sooel Son, Sung-eui Yoon