IWRN: A Robust Blind Watermarking Method for Artwork Image Copyright Protection Against Noise Attack

Feifei Kou, Yuhan Yao, Siyuan Yao, Jiahao Wang, Lei Shi, Yawen Li, Xuejing Kang

Abstract: Adding imperceptible watermarks to artwork images, such as paintings and photographs, can effectively safeguard the copyright of these images without compromising their usability. However, existing blind watermarking techniques encounter two major challenges in addressing this task: imperceptibility and robustness, particularly when subjected to various noise attacks. In this paper, we propose a blind watermarking method for artwork image copyright protection, IWRN, which can ensure both the Imperceptibility of the Watermark and Robustness against Noise attacks. For imperceptibility, we design a Learnable Wavelet Network (LWN) to adaptively embed the watermark into the high-frequency region where the watermark has better invisibility. For robustness, we establish a Deform-Attention based Invertible Neural Network (DA-INN) with a decoding optimization, which offers the advantage of computational reversion, and combines the deform-attention mechanism and decoding optimization to enhance the model's resistance against noises. Additionally, we design a Joint Contrast Learning (JCL) mechanism to improve imperceptibility and robustness simultaneously. Experiments show that our IWRN outperforms other state-of-the-art blind watermarking methods, achieves an average performance of 41.55 PSNR and 99.57% accuracy on the Coco2017, Wikiart, and Div2k datasets when facing 12 kinds of noise attacks.