WaveRecovery: Screen-Shooting Watermarking Based on Wavelet and Recovery

The demand for resilient watermarking technology in the context of the screen-shooting scenario is steadily on the rise. The principal objective of this technique is to embed messages into the cover image, with the ability to effectively recover the message from the screen-captured image at the extraction end. However, current watermarking methods result in low visual quality watermarked images and are insufficiently robust in screen-shooting scenarios. This is mainly because they only utilize spatial domain information during embedding, and they do not consider the impact of noise that introduced during screen capturing. This paper introduces an innovative network framework, including the wavelet domain concatenation and recovery mechanism, to overcome the dual challenges encountered in robust watermarking, namely visual fidelity and robustness. For fidelity, we present a cascade network operating in the wavelet domain. This network excel at detecting watermark information in the wavelet domain. This capability makes it more sensitive to high and low-frequency details. Discrete wavelet transform can make CNN focus on different frequency characteristics, and the use of discrete inverse wavelet transform in upsampling can make the information high fidelity. As a result, it can more accurately identify and preserve critical visual details in this frequency domain, leading to an overall enhancement in visual quality. For robustness, a recovery network is specifically designed to mitigate the influence of noise introduced during screen-shooting on watermark information extraction. Experimental validation of our proposed method substantiates its effectiveness in significantly enhancing the visual quality and the accuracy of the watermarked images.