A generalized deep neural network approach for digital watermarking analysis

Technology advancement has facilitated digital content, such as images, being acquired in large volumes. However, requirement from the privacy or legislation perspective still demands the need for intellectual content protection. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network (DNN) based watermarking method to achieve this goal. Instead of training a neural network for protecting a specific image, we train the network on an image dataset and generalize the trained model to protect distinct test images in a bulk manner. Respective evaluations from both the subjective and objective aspects confirm the generality and practicality of our proposed method. To demonstrate the robustness of this general neural watermarking approach, commonly used attacks are applied to the watermarked images to examine the corresponding extracted watermarks, which still retain sufficient recognizable traits for some occasions. Testing on distinctive dataset shows the satisfying generalization of our proposed method, and practice such as loss function adjustment can cater to the capacity requirement of complicated watermark. We also discuss some traits of the trained model, which incur the vulnerability to JPEG compression attack. However, remedy seeking for this can potentially open a window to understand the underlying working principle of DNN in future work. Considering its performance and economy, it is concluded that subsequent studies that generalize our work on utilizing DNN for intellectual content protection might be a promising research trend.