WRAP: Watermarking Approach Robust Against Film-coating upon Printed Photographs

Recently, print-resist watermarking has attracted much interest. Many watermarking schemes have been proposed to achieve robustness against printing and camera-capturing. Though these studies have shown promising results overall, they overlook the scenario of film-coating photographs, which is a significant and common scenario in real-world. The film-coating process can introduce severe distortions to the original image and easily incapacitate the watermark. To address this issue, we propose WRAP, a novel Watermarking scheme Robust Against film-coating upon Printed photographs. We first construct a large dataset with 120,000 film-coating images to train a style-transfer-based film-coating simulation network. Based on the network, we propose a comprehensive distortion layer which includes film-coating simulation and common disturbances in the printing and camera-capturing process. With the distortion layer, the entire embedding and extraction network can be trained end-to-end to gain robustness against film-coating upon printed photographs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performances of our model in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art print-resist watermarking schemes when testing in film-coating scenario and achieves outstanding performance across various datasets, types of films, and cameras. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to conduct research on digital watermarking in film-coating scenario.