Making Visible Watermarks More Effective
research.googleblog.com
research.googleblog.com
I'm sure a mixture of the original computer vision technique plus some smearing on the original image could wash away even these randomly perturbed watermarks.
Just with many other security matters, you will always be trying to stay one step ahead of someone attempting to circumvent protections. So really the best protection against someone removing watermarks is to file a copyright infringement against the infringing party. DMCA (fixed acronym order :]) is a powerful tool in the USA.
In either case, this was a neat article.
Same can be applied to locks on a house. Prevents someone looking to have fun, from just walking into your home. Otherwise it's too much effort.
Regarding reporting. I've submitted various copyright claims to Instagram for others using my photography, and they responded quickly. It was a smooth transaction.
These are people who are most of the time looking for the open window, the unlocked door, or some other sign of carelessness which they can exploit. Like most predators they're not looking to take down the strongest or the fittest, they're not even looking to take down the average; they're looking for the weak, the sick, the elderly... and they are the biggest victim groups along with criminals themselves.
If you didn't have locks, then most people could break into your house without leaving any indication that the home had been broken into except that they had stolen some of your stuff. A lock means that most people have to either crudely force the lock, break a window, break down the door, etc.
But the practice has somewhat backfired. Some members of the general public now erroneously believe that any image lacking a watermark is a public works.
For one specific anecdote, a local popular bar lifted an image of their establishment found on Flickr and used it in their marketing materials (posters mostly). When contacted about this by the photographer, the establishment claimed due to the lack of watermark and being their establishment they were well within their rights to use the photograph. They eventually agreed to stop using it as a "gesture of goodwill" (but never paid for it, and weren't sued as the cost of even small claims was likely higher than the damages).
You read stories like this often if you hang out on photography forums. The general public seem to conflate a watermark with copyright and a lack of watermark with a public works. Basic copyright needs to be taught in schools.
My origional comment might be a bit simplistic because In my case in order to not be caught they would have to hack not just my lock but also have to hack my security system network (separate from my home Wifi) and disable the alarms and camera.
But you're right not everyone has layers.
Although one could argue a traditional non-smart lock is not hard to "hack" and leave no evidence either.
Also, most smart door locks are operated over a protocol called ZWave which has a limited range. When people talk about smart lock hacking they are usually talking about RF spoofing of the ZWave signal. You can, of course, hack the bridge device if the bridge device is on Wifi.
Can you see our point now?
Off-topic: Can you fill out your profile? I am not active on HN but I sometimes go by the initials fta elsewhere
Absolutely. When I did graphics for a local TV news station, I got very good at quickly cloning away the watermarks on stock photos. Visibly watermarking an image is, at best, a nuisance that deters the lazy.
Similar to how if you want to censor a part of an image, you should always use a single solid color because e.g. a blur can be inverted.
But I guess that would degrade the quality of the watermarked photo too much.
If they are small enough though, then the person copying just overlays their own. Or uses automated inpainting to approximate what's underneath.
https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/18/deep-photo-style-transfe...
Recently I took a 6 weeks vacation. One of my cameras had a dust particle that resulted in several thousand pics having a semi translucent watermark-like impression.
I think that the process shown here to defeat those watermarks would be ideal to batch-correct my pictures. (As of now, I have to manually correct the ones I love and leave the others as they are). Does anyone happen to know a tool that would allow me to do something like that?
As I remember, the same thing happened in one of my friend's wedding. The photographer they hired had one of his lenses with dust, spoiling a lot of pictures... It would be a really nice tool for those situations if they release that code.
Unfortunately, their solution could be quickly defeated with image-to-image generative adversarial convnets trained to... remove watermarks from image pairs. (That is, instead of training a model to change, say, image style or resolution, train it to remove artificially added watermarks.)
We can find the watermark in images and subtract it from the image. If we distort the original watermark, but subtract the average watermark, then you will not recover the original image.
duh?
Right now, sites like shutterstock and other image sites apply the same watermark to every image, making it quite easy to computationally extract the watermark, and then apply the inverse transform to marked images.
If the watermark is permuted on a per-image basis, it becomes much harder, since you can't extract the watermark from a single image.
azdle: That won't work, because "there's exactly one distinct watermark per image, so 1000 of the same image would have the same watermark."
Kdparker: So subtle alter the image, to trick the watermarker in to thinking the image isn't the same, thus generating more distinct watermarks for the (effectively) same image.
Example: When I go through Adobe stock photos, although I find the watermark initially annoying, I would quickly learn to "unsee" it in the next photos because I know how it looks like and where it is on the photo.
With varied watermarks, I'm not sure if the same mental technique can be applied. Shrugs, I may just be overthinking it.
I've been in many situations where the copyright owners reached out for damage fees after downloading a full-res, un-watermarked photo from free stock photos sites in blog posts, so I'm sure the tech is all there already.
These are all situations where the copyright of a stock image owner is infringed and yet there is very little that automated processes can do to detect them.
1) No one outside of the 5 people attending the presentation will ever know. The 5 colleagues following the presentation absolutely don't care where the images are coming from, as long as the point is clear and I'm speaking loud enough.
2) Redistributing ? Really ? If I'm sending a cat picture to my mom, my manager or my favorite slack channel, I'm "redistributing" ? Come on. It's not a publicly available blog post, it's my inner social circle.
I'm never going to pay $30 for the few images I used to make my presentation less boring. However, I can make a little effort and put a 12pt "credits" slide at the end (usually, no one care about).
a. Copyright isn't about audience, it's about author. Ask if the person whose work your using would care, not the people seeing it
b. copying is copying every time, not just after the n-th time
c. credit acknowledgement is good, but it doesn't pay the rent for people who work to create content
d. a rough rule of thumb would be whether you're using art to support a profit motive. Anything that happens for your work would be considered in support of a profit motive.
e. "ask" in point a is not used in the figurative sense
Additionally, DMCA is only valid within the United States.
I'll push for this again, https://github.com/ibudiallo/imgcopyright
Html has a lot of meta attribute, why not one for copyright.
Bits have no color.
I wonder if some kind of a decentralized system could be made to automatically register published images, so that first registration could be reliably proven. Not that first publication equates to copyright, but that would solve part of the problem.
I mean, de-warping warped imagery is something that Google’s image stabilization software used on YouTube can already do very well. Adapting it for this purpose should be possible.
If each image has a slightly different watermark, then simple averaging won't work. Instead you need to come up with a model that describes how the watermark is changing, then estimate parameters of that model. The more complex the change, the more images you need for parameter estimation.
Image stabilization won't work here because it relies on large features and therefore won't be sensitive to relatively weak watermark signal. Besides, it's only stabilizing in three dimensions (pitch, roll, yaw) and won't help with warping within the image.
(1) Rather than a true box the midpoints are going to be slightly buldging, but with a large sample set it's very close to a box.
Sure, you can get into cat and mouse games ever stranger geometry. But, the water mark is limited by how much it distracts from the image.
It does show a good average and simply moving the watermark was easily reversible suggesting detection of a watermark in an image was easy.
My assumption is that a deep learning algorithm trained on multiple different styles and variations of watermarked images would be much more robust to the sort of changes Google proposed in this blog post as a way to defeat their existing algorithms.
The problem with visible watermarks is it detracts from the image visibility. Nobody wants to look at photos or digital art pieces with huge ugly watermarks on them. Could blockchain tech help establish ownership in a way that would make watermarking obsolete?
edit: cool - downvotes for asking a question. Real nice guys.
No clue where the VR came from.
https://www.copyright.gov/registration/index.html
Locating copyright holders is a much thornier problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
but it's not obvious that a decentralized database is more effective somehow than a centralized database.
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect at this point people are a bit fed up of the constant suggestions of using the Blockchain for everything.
Oh well, keep em coming. The downvotes only make me stronger ;)
Don't take downvotes so personally, they're more about weeding out bad ideas from good ones than a reflection of your worth to the community, this isn't reddit where we care about karma count. If you fix up your comment instead of complaining you might see those downvotes get reversed (I've had that a number of times).
But if you're going to use blockchains for voting, you might as well use them for the whole thing. Every new comment, every edit, every deletion and vote. Consensus as moderation.