LKAW: a robust watermarking method based on large kernel convolution and adaptive weight assignment

Abstract

Robust watermarking requires finding invariant features under multiple attacks to ensure correct extraction. Deep learning has extremely powerful in extracting features, and watermarking algorithms based on deep learning have attracted widespread attention. Most existing methods use 3 × 3 small kernel convolution to extract image features and embed the watermarking. However, the effective perception fields for small kernel convolution are extremely confined, so the pixels that each watermarking can affect are restricted, thus limiting the performance of the watermarking. To address these problems, we propose a watermarking network based on large kernel convolution and adaptive weight assignment for loss functions. It uses large-kernel depth-wise convolution to extract features for learning large-scale image information and subsequently projects the watermarking into a high-dimensional space by 1 × 1 convolution to achieve adaptability in the channel dimension. Subsequently, the modification of the embedded watermarking on the cover image is extended to more pixels. Because the magnitude and convergence rates of each loss function are different, an adaptive loss weight assignment strategy is proposed to make the weights participate in the network training together and adjust the weight dynamically. Further, a high-frequency wavelet loss is proposed, by which the watermarking is restricted to only the low-frequency wavelet sub-bands, thereby enhancing the robustness of watermarking against image compression. The experimental results show that the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the encoded image reaches 40.12, the structural similarity (SSIM) reaches 0.9721, and the watermarking has good robustness against various types of noise.