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Google Researchers Made An Algorithm To Delete Watermarks From Photos (venturebeat.com)
"Researchers at Google have found a vulnerability in the way watermarks are used by stock imagery sites like Adobe Stock that makes it possible to remove the opaque stamp used to protect copyright," writes Khari Johnson via VentureBeat. "The consistent nature in which the watermarks are placed on photos can be exploited using an algorithm trained to recognize and automatically remove watermarks." From the report: Changing the position or opacity of a watermark do not impact the algorithm's ability to remove watermarks from images with copyright protection. Randomization, the researchers say, is required to keep images from being stolen. In results presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference last month, subtle modifications to each watermark can make it harder to remove watermarks. With these warped watermarks, attempts to get rid of watermarks with an algorithm or photo editing software leaves noticeable marks, rendering an image useless. "As often done with vulnerabilities discovered in operating systems, applications or protocols, we want to disclose this vulnerability and propose solutions in order to help the photography and stock image communities adapt and better protect its copyrighted content and creations," research scientists Tali Dekel and Michael Rubenstein wrote in a blog post today. "From our experiments much of the world's stock imagery is currently susceptible to this circumvention." You can learn more about the different types of randomization that can be done to combat watermark removal and see more example images in Google's blog post. The full report and research is available via the project's GitHub page.
Please watermark them using an opaque white rectangle exactly the size of the image.
...in 3, 2, 1.
After all, DRM was circumvented and made public how to circumvent it. Or will Google be treated better than a normal Joe Random who happens to find a vulnerability in a commercial product?
Bovi et Iovi, like always.
They SUE YOU
The article misses the point of watermarking. Watermarking is not done to keep a professional user from using imagery. A professional knows better, knows about copyright, and doesn't want to risk to get into trouble for breaking it.
The sole purpose of watermarks is to stop non-professionals -aka your digital illiterates like your grandma and nephew- from using such imagery accidentally.
Also, the same watermarked images are usually found without watermark and within seconds, simply because someone on the web already used/bought/ and published it. Someone who really wants to pirate an image can already easy work around the watermark.
So, to me it seems the author misses the whole point of watermarks. They are not protecting anything. They are only protecting unknowing persons against themselves. They will not stop an intentional pirate. They are not relevant to professionals.
So what remains is a nice gimmick and someone justifying their own salary. And it's also nothing new as people/pirates have been removing watermarks from video content with increasing quality for decades.
I am shocked that this is "Google Research" worthy, as it should be obvious. If I would have known, I would have posted about this a decade ago.
Interesting thing about removing copyright... sometimes the copyright watermark is the only thing that makes the image unique and copyrightable.
Once you remove it, in some cases, there is no inherent copyright. Case in point: Digitized ancient manuscripts. These are public domain digital facsimiles. They are only copyrightable when you add something "unique" to them, like the copyright notice itself. (In the US of course, international copyright will be different).
Remove the entire image leaving the watermark
love is just extroverted narcissism
Wouldn't a pro just use photoshop to remove the adobe watermark?
So, decades gone by, and I've never heard anyone complain about watermarks being ineffective. Google uses enormous resources to crack watermarking, and here's betting they invent watermark 2.0 next week.
Here, pay me protection money, and I won't destroy your retail store.
By the way, serial numbers can be filed off of guns and car parts too. The watermarks were never meant to be perfect -- in fact, it was always easy for a graphic artist to manually remove them -- about ten minutes. But it made obvious that you were crossing the line in doing so.
If Google wants to do something really useful as regards images, they can make a way for me to block or otherwise remove images with watermark from search results. These watermark images are a growing plague that pollutes image searching.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I suppose adding a watermark containing or based on the hash of the original image would suffice to randomise it. How this is applied is open to any number of ways, such as adding a QR code, or a 2D barcode, or warping the watermark according to an algorithm based on the hash. That should be random enough to mess with the removal algorithm.
By removing the water mark you are effectively infringing the copyright
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
How the only stuff Google makes that actually works is designed to screw people? They are a festering sore on the butt of technology. There's probably a cream, but it has been priced out of our reach.
I would love to have this technology for video. Anything to turn off those annoying network bugs while watching TV would be nice. Even if this can't be done in real time right now, having it in MythTV to clean up recordings would be really nice.
At least they don't put the stupid bugs on the video on DVDs. (How long until they try that?)
to filter out Pintrest image search spam?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Watermark software will just have to become more involved to get around this, such as randomizing/distorting size and density of watermarks. Watermarks will become like Captcha's.
Table-ized A.I.
Now please invent something to automatically remove the tiny idiotic censor bars the japanese put on porn.
Welcome to the mid 90s, Google.
I remember using plugins for VirtualDub that did the same thing with video.
All you need to do is recreate a decent representation of the watermark, and the plugin simply subtracts it from the video.
Bonus points if you dynamically handle opacity so you can handle fade in and fade out.
This was done to remove semi-transparent station logos from the bottom right of TV broadcast recordings.
As an artist, this really bothers me.
As a software engineer, I've long known that watermarks can be removed by the diligent or the intentionally malicious. However, now that Google is doing it, those who infringe my works can now claim that the infringement is not intentional - which substantially reduces the penalties for copyright infringement, and increases the incentive to violate copyright.
Google, it seems, has not considered the ethical implications of many of its recent decisions. Without the arts - movies, music, images, etc... - who, but geeks, would use a search engine?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Another method that I've... err.. come across:
Since stock photographers try to maximize their exposure (pun not intended, but noted), the put up their images on a bunch of stock photo sites, each site has its own watermark, usually in a different location, so if you google image search the watermarked image, you can fill in the watermarked areas from those other images.
How long until this because a chat app and how long after that does Google kill it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion