Watermarking textures?

In the face, I'm seeing what is looking like a dancing girl in a dress. Kind of looks like she is waving a purse just above the eyebrow. A semi-circle going from front of lips and following the jowel to just under the earlobe is the bottom of her dress.

I'm also seeing something odd about the ear. Not sure if this will lead to something, though.

I won't describe the techniques I used for the dancing girl in a dress.

I'm still a bit stumped on the wood chips. But once I see a hint of something, I should be able to zero in on it. Or at least come close to something recognizable as not being wood chips.

Sometimes that IS the point in the case of demo textures. However, If invisible watermarks are done well, the degradation of the image is even less than that of the JPEG 2000 compression that ALL textures undergo when uploaded into SL. You simply can't tell the difference without the original image to calculate the difference from.

Abu and Sally have zeroed in on portions of the watermark in the image of the woman, but without the primer I doubt that the watermark can be refined enough to decrypt the image.

The wood chip image I think is going to be impossible without a sophisticated computer aided statistical analysis of color values, but I'll steer clear of any more clues or hints just incase I am wrong.

The point in all this is to show that trying to locate and erase such watermarks from an image is on par, or greater than the effort it takes to create most of the images in the first place.

I've been playing with the wood chips since my post. I did notice something rather odd, but I'm sure if it's anything at all.

There is this bizarre artifacting with a hue between red and magenta (approximately 330). Normally I wouldn't think twice about hue artifacts, but way too many of them in the exact same hue scattered about. They don't belong.

Do I win a cookie?

I can't tell if you're on to something or not since I can't see the exact pattern of artifacting you're describing. You're welcome to post an image.

Both you and Sally split a cookie for the other image .

I'll post the hue artifacts that I am seeing later tonight. I just got done doing a bit of playing and I seriously gotta get some sleep.

Hehe

ROFL


oh and Namssor, thanks for the half-cookie

ok, so are you gonna share? or just tease us? =)

I'll share the watermark from the image with the woman in it, and leave the wood chips as challenge #5. I'll give L$2000 to the first person that can accurately describe or post the watermark in the wood chips image back to this thread.

Here's the watermark extracted from the image I posted (2 transforms):



Here's the watermark extracted from Abu's version (having gone through 4 transforms at this point):

Isn't the watermark on the woodchips a giant Copyright symbol?

Attached are the weird hue artifacts in the wood chips that I'm seeing.

At first I thought it was a colour balance thing, but the magenta hues are too far from cyan. Second thought is that they are just bleed from red, but too far from red to be regular hue bleeding. It's a really bizarre colour spike between red and magenta that doesn't belong.

I don't know if I'll be able to produce the watermark, but at a glance there is definitely something more to the photograph than just wood chips.

lol you can clearly see the letters in that one pic. Here is a zoomed in screen shot. Even after my crappy 85% quality save you can make out what appears to be HERE and some other letters above it.
http://www.asimslife.com/botcamp/letters.jpg

lol..give it a green hue and its even more easily read as 'Abu was here'

EDIT:: Uploaded image to photobucket, link below, green hue, plus took the brightness down a little, clarified it a bit more, no way you cant see it unless colorblind I think....
http://i194.photobucket.com/albums/z91/keira_fatali/greenabu.jpg

i don't see any copyright images in photos is it just me?

unless blatant, such as logos and such in corners, most people don't notice unless you look for them actively.. so if you're looking, including editing images and such to find them, not odd at all lol....

FD, you've got download the images and mess with them in your graphics program to get them to show. It's either a fun challenge or a headache, depending on which way you look at it I'm leaning towards the former myself

PS I eventually managed to reveal the complete watermark in the female face pic late last night .. yipeeeeee.

The magenta artifacts are a red (or should I say magenta) herring.

Back to the chips for just a minute.

I'm also seeing some weird horizontal and vertical lines. At first they kind of look like JPEG compression lines. But they actually look more like another phenomenom I've seen. If you've ever delt with image processing in tiles in a hand-on manner, then there is a good chance you've run into these funky lines.

But they don't form a pattern like when dealing with tiles. They look more along the lines of distortion or position shifting. Or like imperfections when making a photograph tilable.

The lines I'm seeing are hard to describe. They look like several different things without having the complete characteristics of any them.

I'm gonna tuck the chips away for another day. Every now and then pull them out and take another peak.

That's a good observation. I took the texture through a seemless tiling process where I edited the image by hand with a rubber stamp tool after using an offset filter. This is just typical proceedure for cropping and processing a texture that doesn't start out seamless. I originally pulled the image off a free texture site as a much higher resolution JPEG, so you may be seeing spots where JPEG artifacting is uneven or offset where the image was cloned and resampled. It doesn't really have much to do with the way I embedded the watermark because the watermark got embedded after I did all that work on the image.

Another strategy to finding the watermark could also be to find the original texture on the web. It's obviously floating around out there some place (without a watermark). Once found, someone would have to resize and align matching parts and put the image together like a jigsaw puzzle to compensate for the offsets and hand editing, then make a comparison to see what might have been hidden. Either way, it's still a good deal of work.

I have a question...why would you watermark something with an invisible watermark that is THAT hard to find? I can't think of a reason other than trying to bait people into thinking they can use it securely before they get copyright laws shoved down their throats for something that is so well hidden... why watermark something, but have it require lots of work to uncover the watermark?

Unless, of course, it is just to set puzzles for people =P

I can think of a bunch of reasons, some of which are listed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking

This quote from signalspot.com pretty much sums it up:

"Image watermarking provides a means to enforce ownership of image data by altering a raw or compressed image secretly and imperceptibly. It consists of embedding inside an image information that should be undeletable by an opponent, easily and securely detectable by the owner of the contents, perceptually and statistically invisible and resistant against any type of usual processing like compression, filtering or noising."

This may be a fun puzzle for some here in the forums because it is ultimately solvable, but the fact that it is somewhat difficult to solve is key to RL application.

Here's why:

If someone is prone to copying and selling stuff that others have created and they have a choice between copying two virtually identical versions, one version with no watermark (that we know of) and the other version they know has an authors signature securely and invisibly embedded (because that author has disclosed this information), which one are they more likely to take a chance on copying and selling if they don't want to get caught?

Follow up:

Which version might they want to put the extra work on to crack or alter to cover their tracks? Would it be worth it?

But then it is as I said, its basically to get someone to use an image they aren't allowed to, with them thinking its safe. I mean.. I understand thats not the real reason, but when it boils down to it, that is it... if you're selling something, a visible watermark works fine doesn't it? I think it should get people to just NOT use the image altogether, since its really hard to remove a watermark and then alter the image back to looking normal.

The reason for it is to give the 'thief' a false sense of security, and then catch them in the act, not to prevent them from using it

But..i do like puzzles XD

Hmm I thought so.
That is really impressive entire face?
As someone who occasionally borrows images not to sell them but to tweak image for my own use or to study up and closely to learn how the person did it so I can do something different and unique with similar technique if I saw small hidden thing I find it amusing yet
I could if I really wanted remove it too and make it no longer there.
What the point other then putting something other then writing "if you can see this image I hope you're not considering committing copyright theft" in really small print.
I am trying to figure out how to draw really small pixels and finding issues with this for art purposes. Or how to create larger image and not lose the pixels when one shrinks things for other purposes.
I have no clue even how to create image no one else could see.
How do you make image so small no one else can see it?

well, so no one else could see it?
theres always a way to, if they can zoom in as far as you, they can see it... and theres no way possible to allow you to zoom farther than anyone else ever, since even if you did, someone would then match you very quickly

Okiphia, I can't really be any more clearer than I have. This is not about trapping people. It's about helping people keep themselves honest. Those that can't help themselves, or be helped by others with regard to theft will simply ignore all messages in the form of ©.

Maybe someone else can explain it better.

(edit) Upon further rereading of your post, I think you are confused about ownership versus copyright. The creator retains the copyrights. The owner can use what they've purchased from the creator, but they are legally bound under copyright law not to infringe upon the creator's copyrights.