DiffuseTrace: A Transparent and Flexible Watermarking Scheme for Latent Diffusion Model

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable a wide range of applications but raise ethical concerns regarding illegal utilization.Adding watermarks to generative model outputs is a vital technique employed for copyright tracking and mitigating potential risks associated with AI-generated content. However, post-hoc watermarking techniques are susceptible to evasion. Existing watermarking methods for LDMs can only embed fixed messages. Watermark message alteration requires model retraining. The stability of the watermark is influenced by model updates and iterations. Furthermore, the current reconstruction-based watermark removal techniques utilizing variational autoencoders (VAE) and diffusion models have the capability to remove a significant portion of watermarks. Therefore, we propose a novel technique called DiffuseTrace. The goal is to embed invisible watermarks in all generated images for future detection semantically. The method establishes a unified representation of the initial latent variables and the watermark information through training an encoder-decoder model. The watermark information is embedded into the initial latent variables through the encoder and integrated into the sampling process. The watermark information is extracted by reversing the diffusion process and utilizing the decoder. DiffuseTrace does not rely on fine-tuning of the diffusion model components. The watermark is embedded into the image space semantically without compromising image quality. The encoder-decoder can be utilized as a plug-in in arbitrary diffusion models. We validate through experiments the effectiveness and flexibility of DiffuseTrace. DiffuseTrace holds an unprecedented advantage in combating the latest attacks based on variational autoencoders and Diffusion Models.