Universal Watermark Vaccine: Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Watermark Protection

Jianbo Chen, Xinwei Liu, Siyuan Liang, Xiaojun Jia, Yuan Xun; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2023, pp. 2322-2329

As computing ability continues to rapidly develop, neural networks have found widespread use in various fields. However, in the realm of visible watermarking for image copyright protection, neural networks have made image protection through watermarking less effective. Some research has even shown that watermarks can be removed without damaging to the original image, posing a significant threat to digital copyright protection. In response, the community has introduced adversarial perturbations for watermark protection, but these are sample-specific and time-consuming in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a new universal adversarial perturbation for watermark removal networks that offers two options. The first option involves adding perturbations to the entire host image, bringing the output of the watermark removal network closer to the original image and providing protection. The second option involves adding perturbations only to the watermark position, reducing the impact of the perturbation on the image and enhancing stealthiness. Our experiments demonstrate that our method effectively resists watermark removal networks and has good generalizability across different images.