Authors: Vishal Asnani, Shruti Agarwal, John Collomosse
Organizations: Adobe Research · DECaDE, University of Surrey
Abstract
We present FlowMark, a video watermarking framework guided by automatically predicted object masks. In contrast to prior region-based approaches that require user-supplied mask guidance, FlowMark learns to identify optimal regions for watermark embedding through a dedicated Mask Predictor network. Our end-to-end trainable architecture combines region-aware encoding with noise-augmented training to ensure robustness against compression, geometric transformations, and content variation, while preserving high perceptual quality. Our content-adaptive masking keeps watermark signals coherent with natural video dynamics, effectively eliminating perceptual flicker. Beyond compression robustness, FlowMark maintains reliable watermark recovery under video-native temporal edits (e.g., frame swap, insertion, deletion, resampling, and interpolation) and real-world social media distribution pipelines (e.g., YouTube and Facebook re-encoding). Experimental results on both image and video datasets show that FlowMark reliably embeds 128-bit messages with up to 50.08 dB PSNR, offering strong performance for content provenance, temporal authenticity verification, and video integrity protection.
Rapid advancements in video diffusion models have enabled the creation of realistic videos, raising concerns about unauthorized use and driving the demand for techniques to protect model ownership. Existing watermarking methods suffer from two key limitations: they overlook temporal consistency due to conventional watermark decoders and degrade the visual quality of the generated videos. To address these issues, we introduce a robust watermarking method for latent video diffusion models named Latent Video Diffusion Watermarking (LVMark). We propose a novel watermark decoder tailored for generated videos by learning the consistency between adjacent frames. It ensures accurate message decoding, even under malicious attacks, by combining the low-frequency components of the three-dimensional wavelet domain with the color features of the video. Additionally, we train a latent decoder to maintain the visual fidelity of the generated video. Watermarks are embedded into layers with minimal impact on visual appearance using an importance-based weight modulation strategy. We optimize both the watermark decoder and the latent decoder of diffusion model, effectively balancing the trade-off between visual quality and bit accuracy. Our experiments show that our method embeds invisible watermarks into video diffusion models, ensuring robust decoding accuracy with 512-bit capacity, even under distortions.
Invisible image watermarks are increasingly used for deepfake detection and provenance tracking, where they must survive not only incidental distortions but also deliberate removal. We revisit spread-spectrum embedding, a classical watermarking principle, inside a modern neural post-hoc watermarking architecture. Our starting point is a measurement: in existing encoder-decoder schemes each message bit occupies only a small fraction of the image, a shared contributing factor to their fragility, since removal then need only disturb the region a bit occupies. SpreadMark instead spreads each bit as a dense pseudo-random codeword over the whole image and recovers it by matched-filtering a learned cover-suppressed chip representation, with a parallel convolutional decoding path and sparsification-aware training. A conditional chip-space analysis shows that, under a codeword-independent perturbation model, dense spreading increases the budget required to disrupt matched-filter recovery. Evaluated on COCO and DIV2K against nine schemes, SpreadMark is the only evaluated method retaining high detection under both the regeneration and the latent-space sparsification settings we test, with competitive JPEG and additive-noise robustness. It keeps the embedded watermark imperceptible, maintaining high perceptual quality on both COCO and DIV2K.
The rapid progress of image-guided video generation (I2V) has raised concerns about its potential misuse in misinformation and fraud, underscoring the urgent need for effective digital watermarking. While existing watermarking methods demonstrate robustness within a single modality, they fail to trace source images in I2V settings. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of Robust Diffusion Distance, which measures the temporal persistence of watermark signals in generated videos. Building on this, we propose I2VWM, a cross-modal watermarking framework designed to enhance watermark robustness across time. I2VWM leverages a video-simulation noise layer during training and employs an optical-flow-based alignment module during inference. Experiments on both open-source and commercial I2V models demonstrate that I2VWM significantly improves robustness while maintaining imperceptibility, establishing a new paradigm for cross-modal watermarking in the era of generative video. \href{https://github.com/MrCrims/I2VWM-Robust-Watermarking-for-Image-to-Video-Generation}{Code Released.}