Watermarks and Fingerprints as Soft Bindings for Content Provenance: An Open-Licence Benchmark for Images, Audio and Video

Summary

A benchmark compared invisible watermarks and fingerprint registries as soft bindings for recovering C2PA provenance manifests from images, audio and video, using openly licensed models on public media. PixelSeal led on image and video watermarks and AudioSeal on audio, but every TrustMark variant fired on 5.9 to 15.3% of unmarked images. Among fingerprints, copy detectors trained on non-commercial data detected up to 75.5% of transformed images at a pair-level false-match rate of 10^-7, while DINOv2, the best permissively licensed method, reached 65.0%.