NAWE: Digital Watermarking with Neural-Assisted Watermark Extraction

Roman Chaban, Vitaliy Kinakh, Lilian Rouzaire, Slava Voloshynovskiy

NAWE (Neural-Assisted Watermark Extraction) combines an explicit signal-processing watermarking construction with a pretrained neural host predictor. A periodic, perceptually masked watermark carrier provides synchronization, Polar coding supplies redundancy, and denoising followed by subtraction extracts the embedded watermark. The denoiser remains frozen, without watermark-specific training. A one-factor-at-a-time study compares Wiener, BM3D, DRUNet, and GS-DRUNet host estimators. Comparisons with TrustMark, SSL Watermarking, PixelSeal, and WAM show NAWE's lowest geometric and photometric class BER and strong message recovery, while filtering and noise remain limitations consistent with the non-adaptive selection of the watermark extractor. The comparison retains the systems' different payloads and coding.