Are Classification Deep Neural Networks Good for Blind Image Watermarking?

Image watermarking is usually decomposed into three steps: (i) a feature vector is extracted from an image; (ii) it is modified to embed the watermark; (iii) and it is projected back into the image space while avoiding the creation of visual artefacts. This feature extraction is usually based on a classical image representation given by the Discrete Wavelet Transform or the Discrete Cosine Transform for instance. These transformations require very accurate synchronisation between the embedding and the detection and usually rely on various registration mechanisms for that purpose. This paper investigates a new family of transformation based on Deep Neural Networks trained with supervision for a classification task. Motivations come from the Computer Vision literature, which has demonstrated the robustness of these features against light geometric distortions. Also, adversarial sample literature provides means to implement the inverse transform needed in the third step above mentioned. As far as zero-bit watermarking is concerned, this paper shows that this approach is feasible as it yields a good quality of the watermarked images and an intrinsic robustness. We also tests more advanced tools from Computer Vision such as aggregation schemes with weak geometry and retraining with a dataset augmented with classical image processing attacks.