Deep Image Watermarking to JPEG Compression Based on Mixed-Frequency Channel Attention

Deep blind watermarking algorithms based on an end-to-end encoder-decoder architecture have recently been extensively studied as an important technology for protecting copyright. However, none of the existing algorithms can fully utilize the channel features of the image to improve the robustness against JPEG compression while obtaining high visual quality. Therefore, we propose firstly a mixed-frequency channel attention method in the encoder, which utilizes different frequency components of the 2D-DCT domain as weight coefficients during channel squeezing and excitation. Its essence is to suppress the useless feature maps and enhance the feature maps suitable for watermarking embedding by introducing frequency analysis in the channel dimension. The experimental results indicate that the PSNR of our method reaches over 38 and the BER is less than 0.01% under the JPEG compression with quality factor Q = 50. Besides, the proposed framework also obtains excellent robustness for a variety of common distortions, including Gaussian filter, crop, crop out, and drop out.