Blind Visible Watermark Removal with Morphological Dilation

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Hauptverfasser: Robinette, Preston K., Johnson, Taylor T.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Robinette, Preston K.
Johnson, Taylor T.
author_facet Robinette, Preston K.
Johnson, Taylor T.
contents Visible watermarks pose significant challenges for image restoration techniques, especially when the target background is unknown. Toward this end, we present MorphoMod, a novel method for automated visible watermark removal that operates in a blind setting -- without requiring target images. Unlike existing methods, MorphoMod effectively removes opaque and transparent watermarks while preserving semantic content, making it well-suited for real-world applications. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including the Colored Large-scale Watermark Dataset (CLWD), LOGO-series, and the newly introduced Alpha1 datasets, demonstrate that MorphoMod achieves up to a 50.8% improvement in watermark removal effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies highlight the impact of prompts used for inpainting, pre-removal filling strategies, and inpainting model performance on watermark removal. Additionally, a case study on steganographic disorientation reveals broader applications for watermark removal in disrupting high-level hidden messages. MorphoMod offers a robust, adaptable solution for watermark removal and opens avenues for further advancements in image restoration and adversarial manipulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02676
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Blind Visible Watermark Removal with Morphological Dilation
Robinette, Preston K.
Johnson, Taylor T.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Visible watermarks pose significant challenges for image restoration techniques, especially when the target background is unknown. Toward this end, we present MorphoMod, a novel method for automated visible watermark removal that operates in a blind setting -- without requiring target images. Unlike existing methods, MorphoMod effectively removes opaque and transparent watermarks while preserving semantic content, making it well-suited for real-world applications. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including the Colored Large-scale Watermark Dataset (CLWD), LOGO-series, and the newly introduced Alpha1 datasets, demonstrate that MorphoMod achieves up to a 50.8% improvement in watermark removal effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies highlight the impact of prompts used for inpainting, pre-removal filling strategies, and inpainting model performance on watermark removal. Additionally, a case study on steganographic disorientation reveals broader applications for watermark removal in disrupting high-level hidden messages. MorphoMod offers a robust, adaptable solution for watermark removal and opens avenues for further advancements in image restoration and adversarial manipulation.
title Blind Visible Watermark Removal with Morphological Dilation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02676