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Making Visible Watermarks More Effective

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Posted by Tali Dekel and Michael Rubinstein, Research Scientistsstock photographyOn The Effectiveness Of Visible Watermarks2017 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference

Left: example watermarked images from popular stock photography websites. Right: watermark-free version of the images on the left, produced automatically by a computer algorithm. More results are available below and on our project page. Image sources: Adobe Stock, 123RF.

vulnerabilitiesThe Vulnerability of Visible Watermarksseveral minutes to remove a watermark

The consistency of a watermark over many images allows to automatically remove it in mass scale. Left: input collection marked by the same watermark, middle: computed watermark and its opacity, right: recovered, watermark-free images. Image sources: COCO dataset, Copyright logo.

Watermark extraction with increasing number of images. Left: watermarked input images, Middle: median intensities over the input images (up to the input image shown), Right: the corresponding estimated (matted) watermark. All images licensed from 123RF.

alpha mattesingle image mattingproject page

Left column: Watermark estimated automatically from watermarked images online (rendered on a gray background). Middle colum: Input watermarked image. Right column: Automatically removed watermark. Image sources: Adobe Stock, Can Stock Photo, 123RF, Fotolia.