Google researchers have found a way to delete watermarks from photos

Google researchers have found a way to 

delete watermarks from photos

NEW DELHI: Researchers at Google have found a new vulnerability that can remove watermarks from stock imagery websites such as Adobe Stock. The search giant says that using an algorithm based on the vulnerability, they were able to remove the opaque stamp used to protect the copyright of the images.

"However, in "On The Effectiveness Of Visible Watermarks" recently presented at the 2017 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR 2017), we show that a computer algorithm can get past this protection and remove watermarks automatically, giving users unobstructed access to the clean images the watermarks are intended to protect," say Tali Dekel and Michael Rubinstein of Google in a blog post.

It has been also mentioned that changing the position or opacity of a watermark does not effect the algorithm that removes the watermark. To tackle the vulnerability, researchers say that inconsistency in watermarks should solve the issue.

"The vulnerability of current watermarking techniques lies in the consistency in watermarks across image collections. Therefore, to counter it, we need to introduce inconsistencies when embedding the watermark in each image," they said. According to the researchers "introducing random geometric perturbations to the watermark — warping it when embedding it in each image, improves the robustness."

They however, have said that it is not guaranteed that the process will work like it should always. But it should make it more difficult for users to steal images.

"While we cannot guarantee that there will not be a way to break such randomized watermarking schemes in the future, we believe (and our experiments show) that randomization will make watermarked collection attacks fundamentally more difficult," they said.

On a related note, Google is reportedly testing a lighter version of its Search app in Indonesia. The app will be making it faster to search content even in slow networks. The app is also said to come with some offline features.