arXiv:2611.16368 · v1

ReliaGuard: Reconstruction-Aware Watermarking for Source Attribution and Blind Edit Localization

首次提交 2026-11-12 14:33

版本更新 2026-11-12 14:33

雷达观测 2026-11-13 14:15

摘要

Generative image editing facilitates content creation but complicates source attribution and edit verification. Existing watermarking methods combine copyright protection with tamper localization, yet background reconstruction can weaken spatial evidence even when source identifiers remain recoverable. We propose ReliaGuard, a reconstruction-aware watermarking framework for source attribution and blind edit localization. The writer optimizes keyed feature responses in both the protected image and its variational autoencoder reconstruction under image-distortion and source-preservation constraints. Using only the received image and a secret key, the reader combines watermark responses with local image context through residual evidence refinement and predicts an edit mask through native-resolution-guided multiscale reading. It is trained on complete editing outputs, locally spliced counterparts, and processed versions of both. On an independent test set of 300 source images and 900 editing cases from three image domains, our method achieves edit-region intersection-over-union scores of 85.61% for complete outputs and 94.90% for locally spliced outputs at a threshold calibrated to a nominal 1% background false-positive rate on complete outputs. The complete-output result exceeds the strongest baseline by 45.02 percentage points, while decoded identifier-bit accuracy reaches 100% in both conditions. Across seven families of image processing, the corresponding localization scores are 81.01% and 86.49%, with identifier-bit accuracies of 92.76% and 92.79%, respectively. These results support source recovery and blind edit localization under background reconstruction and subsequent image processing.