Visual masks for digital watermarking of digital imagery

A method of generating a visual mask using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the visual mask to guide digital watermark embedding of digital imagery, said method comprising:

• initializing weights of the CNN to yield initialized weights;
• performing a forward pass of an input image through the CNN to obtain a visual mask, the visual mask intended to guide digital watermarking of the input image, the visual mask comprising a plurality of values, each of which corresponds to a pixel location or group of pixels location;
• embedding the input image using a digital watermark signal according to the visual mask, said embedding yielding an embedded input image;
• determining a perceptual metric between the input image and the embedded input image;
• determining a detection metric associated with detection of the digital watermark signal from the embedded input image;
• combining the perceptual metric and the detection metric to yield an overall loss;
• and
• adjusting the initialized weights of the CNN by backpropagation to reduce the overall loss.

A method of generating a visual mask using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), the visual mask to guide digital watermark embedding of digital imagery, said method comprising:

• initializing weights of the CNN;
• for each input image within a batch of input images:
• executing a forward pass of an input image through the CNN to obtain the visual mask;
• embedding the input image using a digital watermark signal according to the visual mask to yield an embedded input image;
• determining a perceptual difference metric between the input image and the embedded input image;
• determining a detection metric associated with detecting the digital watermark signal from the embedded input image;
• combining the perceptual difference metric and the detection metric to yield an overall loss;
• and
• adjusting the weights of the CNN to minimize the overall loss.