Background adaptive PosMarker based on online generation and detection for locating watermarked regions in photographs

Abstract

Robust watermarking technology can embed invisible messages in screens to trace the source of unauthorized screen photographs. Locating the four vertices of the embedded region in the photograph is necessary, as existing watermarking methods require geometric correction of the embedded region before revealing the message. Existing localization methods suffer from a performance trade-off: either causing unaesthetic visual quality by embedding visible markers or achieving poor localization precision, leading to message extraction failure. To address this issue, we propose a background adaptive position marker, PosMarker, based on the gray level co-occurrence matrix and the noise visibility function. Besides, we propose an online generation scheme that employs a learnable generator to cooperate with the detector, allowing joint optimization between the two. This simultaneously improves both visual quality and detection precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior localization precision of our PosMarker-based method compared to others.