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Main Authors: Chen, Pengzhen, Liu, Yanwei, Gu, Xiaoyan, Argyriou, Antonios, Liu, Wu, Wang, Weiping
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26702
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author Chen, Pengzhen
Liu, Yanwei
Gu, Xiaoyan
Argyriou, Antonios
Liu, Wu
Wang, Weiping
author_facet Chen, Pengzhen
Liu, Yanwei
Gu, Xiaoyan
Argyriou, Antonios
Liu, Wu
Wang, Weiping
contents Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_26702
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling
Chen, Pengzhen
Liu, Yanwei
Gu, Xiaoyan
Argyriou, Antonios
Liu, Wu
Wang, Weiping
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.
title Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26702