Screen-Shooting Resistant Watermarking with Grayscale Deviation Simulation

With the prevalence of electronic devices in our daily lives, content leakages frequently occur, and to enable leakage tracing, screen-shooting resistant watermarking has attracted tremendous attention. However, current studies often overlook a thoughtful investigation of the cross-media screen-camera process and fail to consider the effect of grayscale deviation on the screen. In this paper, we propose screen-shooting distortion simulation (SSDS), which involves a grayscale deviation function for constructing a more practical noise layer. We divide SSDS into screen display and camera shoot. For screen displaying, different viewing angles result in grayscale deviation with distinct intensities, and we simulate the distortions by modeling the relative position of the viewing point and the screen plane. For camera shooting, a series of distortion functions are used to approximate the perturbations in the camera pipeline, including defocus blur, noise and JPEG compression. Furthermore, the gradient-guided encoder is designed to conduct the embedding in the texture region using a modification cost map. Experimental results show that our proposed watermarking framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of robustness and visual quality