Concealed Attack for Robust Watermarking Based on Generative Model and Perceptual Loss

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 32; no. 8; pp. 5695 - 5706
• Main Authors: Li, Qi, Wang, Xingyuan, Ma, Bin, Wang, Xiaoyu, Wang, Chunpeng, Gao, Suo, Shi, Yunqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Coders; concealed attack; Encoders-Decoders; Feature extraction; generative adversarial network; Generative adversarial networks; Generators; Image quality; imperceptibility; Neural networks; Optimization; perceptual losses; Robustness; Transforms; Watermarking
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2021.3138795

While existing watermarking attack methods can disturb the correct extraction of watermark information, the visual quality of watermarked images will be greatly damaged. Therefore, a concealed attack based on generative adversarial network and perceptual losses for robust watermarking is proposed. First, the watermarked image is utilized as the input of generative networks, and its generating target (i.e. attacked watermarked image) is the original image. Inspired by the U-Net network, the generative networks consist of encoder-decoder architecture with skip connection, which can combine the low-level and high-level information to ensure the imperceptibility of the generated image. Next, to further improve the imperceptibility of the generated image, instead of the loss function based on MSE, a perceptual loss based on feature extraction is introduced. In addition, a discriminative network is also introduced to make the appearance and distribution of generated image similar to those of the original image. The addition of the discriminative network can remove watermark information effectively. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed concealed attack method. Experimental and analysis results demonstrate that the proposed concealed attack method has better imperceptibility and attack ability in comparison to the existing watermarking attack methods.