PatchWiper: Leveraging Dynamic Patch-Wise Parameters for Real-World Visible Watermark Removal

Visible watermark removal is crucial for evaluating watermark robustness and advancing more resilient protection techniques. Current methods face challenges in real-world scenarios due to architectural constraints in multi-task frameworks and limited dataset diversity. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel two-stage framework, PatchWiper, consisting of an independent watermark segmentation network and a highly dynamic patch-wise restoration network. This framework decouples watermark localization from background restoration, allowing each network to focus on its designated task. Our restoration network dynamically generates unique parameters for each image patch, enabling fine-grained adaptation to different watermark distortions. Second, we construct the Pixabay Real-world Watermark Dataset (PRWD ), which incorporates diverse background images and over 1,000 distinct watermark types, providing a more comprehensive benchmark for evaluating watermark removal methods. Extensive experiments on PRWD, ILAW, and real-world testing images demonstrate our method's superior performance over existing approaches, particularly in handling complex real-world cases.