EditGuard: Versatile Image Watermarking for Tamper Localization and Copyright Protection

In the era of AI-generated content (AIGC), malicious tampering poses imminent threats to copyright integrity and information security. Current deep image watermarking, while widely accepted for safeguarding visual content, can only protect copyright and ensure traceability. They fall short in localizing increasingly realistic image tampering, potentially leading to trust crises, privacy violations, and legal disputes. To solve this challenge, we propose an innovative proactive forensics framework EditGuard, to unify copyright protection and tamper-agnostic localization, especially for AIGC-based editing methods. It can offer a meticulous embedding of imperceptible watermarks and precise decoding of tampered areas and copyright information. Leveraging our observed fragility and locality of image-into-image steganography, the realization of EditGuard can be converted into a united image-bit steganography issue, thus completely decoupling the training process from the tampering types. Extensive experiments verify that our EditGuard balances the tamper localization accuracy, copyright recovery precision, and generalizability to various AIGC-based tampering methods, especially for image forgery that is difficult for the naked eye to detect.