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