In plain words: A trained encoder hides a link's bits in a photo so it looks unchanged, and a decoder reads them back through a camera despite printing and shooting distortions. It recovered 56-bit links in real time from videos with changing light, angles, and blocked views.
Abstract · StegaStamp: Invisible Hyperlinks in Physical Photographs
Printed and digitally displayed photos have the ability to hide imperceptible digital data that can be accessed through internet-connected imaging systems. Another way to think about this is physical photographs that have unique QR codes invisibly embedded within them. This paper presents an architecture, algorithms, and a prototype implementation addressing this vision. Our key technical contribution is StegaStamp, a learned steganographic algorithm to enable robust encoding and decoding of arbitrary hyperlink bitstrings into photos in a manner that approaches perceptual invisibility. StegaStamp comprises a deep neural network that learns an encoding/decoding algorithm robust to image perturbations approximating the space of distortions resulting from real printing and photography. We demonstrates real-time decoding of hyperlinks in photos from in-the-wild videos that contain variation in lighting, shadows, perspective, occlusion and viewing distance. Our prototype system robustly retrieves 56 bit hyperlinks after error correction - sufficient to embed a unique code within every photo on the internet.
Matthew Tancik, Ben Mildenhall, Ren Ng
arXiv:1904.05343 · cs.CV · submitted Apr 10, 2019 · updated Mar 26, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · CVPR 2020, Project page: http://www.matthewtancik.com/stegastamp