Screen-Shooting Resilient Watermarking Scheme Combining Invertible Neural Network and Inverse Gradient Attention

With the growing use of smart devices, the ease of sharing digital media content has been enhanced. Concerns have been raised about unauthorized access, particularly via screen shooting. In this paper, a novel end-to-end watermarking framework is proposed, employing invertible neural networks and inverse gradient attention, to tackle the copyright infringement challenges related to screen content leakage. A single invertible neural network is employed by the proposed method for watermark embedding and extraction, ensuring information integrity during network propagation. Additionally, robustness and visual quality are enhanced by an inverse gradient attention module, which emphasizes pixel values and embeds the watermark in imperceptible areas for better invisibility and model resilience. Model parameters are optimized using the Learnable Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) loss function, minimizing perception differences in watermarked images. The superiority of this approach over existing learning-based screen-shooting resilient watermarking methods in terms of robustness and visual quality is demonstrated by experimental results. © 2024 Science Press. All rights reserved.