On the Coexistence and Ensembling of Watermarks
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jan 29, 2025
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, 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.
