defense 2025

Semantic Watermarking Reinvented: Enhancing Robustness and Generation Quality with Fourier Integrity

Sung Ju Lee , Nam Ik Cho

0 citations

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Published on arXiv

2509.07647

Output Integrity Attack

OWASP ML Top 10 — ML09

Key Finding

Achieves state-of-the-art watermark detection accuracy while maintaining superior image fidelity (FID and CLIP scores) across regeneration and cropping attack scenarios.

SFWMark (Hermitian Symmetric Fourier Watermarking)

Novel technique introduced


Semantic watermarking techniques for latent diffusion models (LDMs) are robust against regeneration attacks, but often suffer from detection performance degradation due to the loss of frequency integrity. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel embedding method called Hermitian Symmetric Fourier Watermarking (SFW), which maintains frequency integrity by enforcing Hermitian symmetry. Additionally, we introduce a center-aware embedding strategy that reduces the vulnerability of semantic watermarking due to cropping attacks by ensuring robust information retention. To validate our approach, we apply these techniques to existing semantic watermarking schemes, enhancing their frequency-domain structures for better robustness and retrieval accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art verification and identification performance, surpassing previous approaches across various attack scenarios. Ablation studies confirm the impact of SFW on detection capabilities, the effectiveness of the center-aware embedding against cropping, and how message capacity influences identification accuracy. Notably, our method achieves the highest detection accuracy while maintaining superior image fidelity, as evidenced by FID and CLIP scores. Conclusively, our proposed SFW is shown to be an effective framework for balancing robustness and image fidelity, addressing the inherent trade-offs in semantic watermarking. Code available at https://github.com/thomas11809/SFWMark


Key Contributions

  • Hermitian Symmetric Fourier Watermarking (SFW) that enforces Hermitian symmetry to preserve frequency integrity, improving detection robustness in semantic watermarking for LDMs
  • Center-aware embedding strategy that concentrates watermark information to resist cropping attacks
  • SOTA verification and identification accuracy across multiple attack scenarios while maintaining high image fidelity (FID and CLIP scores)

🛡️ Threat Analysis

Output Integrity Attack

Embeds watermarks in LDM-generated image outputs to authenticate provenance and enable detection — directly addresses output integrity and content watermarking. Defends against watermark removal via regeneration and cropping attacks.


Details

Domains
visiongenerative
Model Types
diffusion
Threat Tags
inference_timedigital
Applications
ai-generated image watermarkingcontent provenanceimage authentication