Are Watermarked Images Editable? SafeMark for Watermark-Preserving Text-Guided Image Editing
Xiaodong Wu, Qi Li, Xiangman Li, Zelin Zhang, Lingshuang Liu, Jianbing Ni

TL;DR
SafeMark is a novel framework that enables watermark-preserving text-guided image editing, ensuring high watermark integrity without compromising semantic edit quality across various editing methods.
Contribution
It introduces a watermark-decoding loss into diffusion-based editors, theoretically grounding watermark preservation and demonstrating its effectiveness empirically.
Findings
SafeMark achieves high watermark bit accuracy across diverse edits.
Semantic quality of images remains high with watermark preservation.
Robustness to post-edit distortions is maintained.
Abstract
This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored question: can watermarked images remain editable without compromising watermark integrity? We propose SafeMark, a framework for watermark-preserving text-guided image manipulation that explicitly integrates watermark integrity into the editing process. Specifically, SafeMark adds a thresholded watermark-decoding loss directly to the diffusion editor's training objective, fine-tuning the editor so that semantically valid edits also preserve the embedded watermark at the final output. This design admits a clean information-theoretic justification: maintaining high bit-accuracy on the edited image lower-bounds the mutual information that the editor channel preserves between watermark and edited output, the quantity that fundamentally controls watermark recoverability. SafeMark is compatible with differentiable diffusion-based editors,…
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