Blind Visible Watermark Removal with Morphological Dilation

TL;DR

MorphoMod is a new blind visible watermark removal method that effectively eliminates watermarks while preserving image content, outperforming existing techniques and enabling broader applications in image restoration and security.

Contribution

Introduces MorphoMod, a novel blind watermark removal approach that handles opaque and transparent watermarks without needing target images, improving effectiveness by up to 50.8%.

Findings

Achieves up to 50.8% improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

Effectively removes both opaque and transparent watermarks.

Demonstrates potential in disrupting steganographic messages.

Abstract

Visible watermarks pose significant challenges for image restoration techniques, especially when the target background is unknown. Toward this end, we present MorphoMod, a novel method for automated visible watermark removal that operates in a blind setting -- without requiring target images. Unlike existing methods, MorphoMod effectively removes opaque and transparent watermarks while preserving semantic content, making it well-suited for real-world applications. Evaluations on benchmark datasets, including the Colored Large-scale Watermark Dataset (CLWD), LOGO-series, and the newly introduced Alpha1 datasets, demonstrate that MorphoMod achieves up to a 50.8% improvement in watermark removal effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies highlight the impact of prompts used for inpainting, pre-removal filling strategies, and inpainting model performance on watermark removal. Additionally, a case study on steganographic disorientation reveals broader applications for watermark removal in disrupting high-level hidden messages. MorphoMod offers a robust, adaptable solution for watermark removal and opens avenues for further advancements in image restoration and adversarial manipulation.