Semantic Security: A Digital Watermark Method for Image Semantic Preservation

Digital watermarking has long been used to protect digital images from abuse. However, applying digital watermarking to semantic communication remains a challenge. This work introduces a secure coding method that combines semantic coding and digital watermarking techniques. The proposed method selects points in the target image with high semantic importance and embeds watermark information into their position vectors, perpendicular to the embedding domains of previous works. The experiments conducted on the Cityscapes dataset demonstrate that our method integrates well with semantic communication systems. Compared to the previous approach, our proposed method can more completely preserve the structural features of the target image and is better suited for Machine Type Communication (MTC) tasks, such as target detection and semantic segmentation.