Deep Robust Reversible Watermarking

Robust Reversible Watermarking (RRW) enables perfect recovery of cover images and watermarks in lossless channels while ensuring robust watermark extraction under lossy channels. However, existing RRW methods, mostly non-deep learning-based, suffer from complex designs, high computational costs, and poor robustness limiting their practical applications. To address these issues, this paper proposes Deep Robust Reversible Watermarking (DRRW), a deep learning-based RRW scheme. DRRW introduces an Integer Invertible Watermark Network (iIWN) to achieve an invertible mapping between integer data distributions, fundamentally addressing the limitations of conventional RRW approaches. Unlike traditional RRW methods requiring task-specific designs for different distortions, DRRW adopts an encoder-noise layer-decoder framework, enabling adaptive robustness against various distortions through end-to-end training. During inference, the cover image and watermark are mapped into an overflowed stego image and latent variables. Arithmetic coding efficiently compresses these into a compact bitstream, which is embedded via reversible data hiding to ensure lossless recovery of both the image and watermark. To reduce pixel overflow, we introduce an overflow penalty loss, significantly shortening the auxiliary bitstream while improving both robustness and stego image quality. Additionally, we propose an adaptive weight adjustment strategy that eliminates the need to manually preset the watermark loss weight, ensuring improved training stability and performance. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed DRRW addresses key challenges in current RRW methods and significantly advances the practical deployment of RRW.