Watermark Removal Attack Against Text-to-Image Generative Model Watermarking

Zihan Yuan, Li Li, Zichi Wang, Jingyuan Jiang, Xinpeng Zhang

Abstract: The artist's style can be quickly imitated by fine-tuning a text-to-image model using artist's artworks, which raises serious copyright concerns. Scholars have proposed many watermarking methods to protect the artists' copyright. To evaluate the security and enhance the performance of existing watermarking, this paper proposes a watermark removal attack for text-to-image generative model watermarking for the first time. This attack aims to invalidate watermarking designed to detect art theft mimicry in text-to-image models. In this method, a watermark recognition network and a watermark removal network are designed. The watermark recognition network identifies whether an artwork contains watermark, and the watermark removal network is used to remove it. Consequently, text-to-image models fine-tuned with watermark-removed artworks can reproduce an artist's style while evading watermark detection. This makes the copyright authentication of artworks ineffective. Experiments show that the proposed attack can effectively remove watermarks, with watermark extraction accuracy dropping below 48.64%. Additionally, the images after watermark removal retain high similarity to the original images, with PSNR exceeding 27.96 and SSIM exceeding 0.92.