Track: long paper (up to 9 pages)
Keywords: watermarking, watermark, ensembles, content provenance
TL;DR: We find that, surprisingly, different watermarks can coexist in the same image which enables us to build ensembles of watermarks that can open up new accuracy-robustness-capcity-quality trade-offs without further training.
Abstract: Watermarking, the practice of embedding imperceptible information into media such as images, videos, audio, and text, is essential for intellectual property protection, content provenance and attribution. The growing complexity of digital ecosystems necessitates watermarks for different uses to be embedded in the same media. However, in order to be able to detect and decode all watermarks, they need to coexist well with one another. We perform the first study of coexistence of deep image watermarking methods and, contrary to intuition, we find that various open-source watermarks can coexist with only minor impacts on image quality and decoding robustness. The coexistence of watermarks also opens the avenue for ensembling watermarking methods. We show how ensembling can increase the overall message capacity and enable new trade-offs between capacity, accuracy, robustness and image quality, without needing to retrain the base models.
Presenter: ~Aleksandar_Petrov1
Format: Yes, the presenting author will attend in person if this work is accepted to the workshop.
Funding: Yes, the presenting author of this submission falls under ICLR’s funding aims, and funding would significantly impact their ability to attend the workshop in person.
Anonymization: This submission has been anonymized for double-blind review via the removal of identifying information such as names, affiliations, and identifying URLs.
Submission Number: 2
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