RingID: Rethinking Tree-Ring Watermarking for Enhanced Multi-Key Identification

TL;DR

This paper critically analyzes the Tree-Ring Watermarking method, revealing its robustness origins and flaws, and introduces RingID, a novel multi-channel watermarking approach that significantly improves multi-key identification capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents RingID, a new multi-channel watermarking technique that enhances multi-key identification by combining diverse watermarks and addressing previous design flaws.

Findings

Distribution shift contributes to robustness.

RingID outperforms previous methods in multi-key identification.

Enhanced robustness and multi-key detection accuracy.

Abstract

We revisit Tree-Ring Watermarking, a recent diffusion model watermarking method that demonstrates great robustness to various attacks. We conduct an in-depth study on it and reveal that the distribution shift unintentionally introduced by the watermarking process, apart from watermark pattern matching, contributes to its exceptional robustness. Our investigation further exposes inherent flaws in its original design, particularly in its ability to identify multiple distinct keys, where distribution shift offers no assistance. Based on these findings and analysis, we present RingID for enhanced multi-key identification. It consists of a novel multi-channel heterogeneous watermarking approach designed to seamlessly amalgamate distinctive advantages from diverse watermarks. Coupled with a series of suggested enhancements, RingID exhibits substantial advancements in multi-key identification. Github Page: https://github.com/showlab/RingID