SEDD: Robust Blind Image Watermarking With Single Encoder And Dual Decoders

Abstract Blind image watermarking is regarded as a vital technology to provide copyright of digital images. Due to the rapid growth of deep neural networks, deep learning-based watermarking methods have been widely studied. However, most existing methods which adopt simple embedding and extraction structures cannot fully utilize the image features. In this paper, we propose a novel Single-Encoder-Dual-Decoder (SEDD) watermarking architecture to achieve high imperceptibility and strong robustness. Precisely, the single encoder utilizes normalizing flow to realize watermark embedding, which can effectively fuse the watermark and cover image. For watermark extraction, we introduce a parallel dual-decoder to improve the imperceptibility and extracting ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that better watermark robustness and imperceptibility are obtained by SEDD architecture. Our method achieves a bit error rate less than 0.1% under most attacks such as JPEG compression, Gaussian blur and crop. Besides, the proposed method also obtains strong robustness under combined attacks and social platform processing.