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The first neural watermark designed for provenance at scale.
Published August 30, 2026; Updated September 4, 2026
We are introducing our new line of AI-powered watermarks, PawPrint, available for image and audio and video. PawPrint represents a massive leap in performance over existing models, across all dimensions (speed, accuracy, durability, perceptibility, etc.). It can be swiftly deployed in any business use case where digital media content needs to be reliably identified. PawPrint is available today as part of our C2PA Signing API & SDK services.
Trufo's pawprint.video watermark delivers a substantial improvement in watermark performance across the board:
Watermark
Company
Year
Payload [bits]
Decode [ms]
VMAF ↑
FPR ↓
Durability ↑
Score
pawprint.video
Trufo
2026
44A-
1.55A
95.06A-
0.000A
0.780A-
94
pixelseal.bch44²
Meta
2025
44A-
2.62A-
96.71A-
0.000A
0.583B-
86
videoseal.bch128²
Meta
2024
128A
2.57A-
95.44A-
0.000A
0.530C+
86
rivagan
Academic
2019
32B+
5.41B+
98.68B+
1.000D
0.313C-
56
1Assigned grades are adjusted based on a mix of other perceptibility metrics.
2Enhanced by Trufo with BCH error correction.
When paired with Trufo's provenance platform, pawprint.video becomes the natural choice for practical watermark deployment in almost any commercial setting.
Fluid and per-Frame
The pawprint.video watermark is applied to every frame, creating a fluid watermark that is imperceptible (adversarially-trained) and robust (even on screenshots). Here is an example of the watermark:
Original
Watermarked
To visualize what the watermark looks like, here is the watermark residual, at 24× amplification, of the four watermarks we tested.
pawprint.video · ×24
pixelseal.bch44 · ×24
videoseal.bch128 · ×24
rivagan · ×24
The pawprint.video watermark offers a good balance of luma and chroma components, and moves dynamically with the underlying video content.
Evaluation
We compare pawprint.video against three video watermarks that we were able to obtain for testing:
pixelseal (Meta, 2025)
videoseal (Meta, 2024)
rivagan (Academic, 2019)
The evaluations are conducted on a collection of 100 10s clips drawn from four datasets: wikimedia-commons, nasa-svs, blender-open-movies, and xiph-pd. The test set was excluded from the training set.
Speed
We benchmarked encode and decode speed, from compressed input file to compressed output file, for full-length clips.
pawprint.video
pixelseal.bch44
videoseal.bch128
rivagan
encode (fps)
178.6
226.1
231.3
148.8
full decode (fps)
644.5
381.0
388.4
185.0
Overall, pawprint.video is the fastest, both in decoding and (once correcting for how pixelseal and videoseal copy watermarks across frames) in encoding.
Perceptibility
We looked at five standard metrics: PSNR, SSIM, VMAF, LPIPS, and wM4E.
Watermark
PSNR [dB] ↑
SSIM ↑
VMAF ↑
LPIPS ↓
wM4E ↓
pawprint.video
44.98
0.98092
95.06
0.00450
0.271
pixelseal.bch44
47.12
0.95653
96.71
0.00356
0.759
videoseal.bch128
46.97
0.98799
95.44
0.00312
0.413
rivagan
42.52
0.94029
98.68
0.04454
1.243
They present completely conflicting opinions; the takeaway is that quantifying perceptibility is a tricky matter and overall all four watermarks are solid.
Durability
We tested exact recovery of the payload against a variety of attacks. The evaluation included the following attacks:
compression (H.264 CRF 20-30)
reflection & rotation (orthogonal)
resolution changes (720p, 360p) & aspect ratio changes
speed modulation
grayscale & color filters
Note that we set the "clean" baseline to be 1080p CRF 18. Three types of evaluations were done: on single-frames, on 1s-segments, and on full-length clips.
Watermark
Payload [bits]
Clean frame
Clean 1 s
Clean 10 s
Attacked frame
Attacked 1 s
Attacked 10 s
FPR
pawprint.video
44
91%
99%
100%
73%
77%
84%
0%
pixelseal.bch44
44
53%
90%
98%
39%
64%
72%
0%
videoseal.bch128
128
58%
94%
99%
32%
58%
69%
0%
rivagan
32
78%
85%
91%
27%
33%
34%
100%
clean, by read length
frame
1s
10s
attacked, by read length
frame
1s
10s
Trufo's pawprint.video shows by far the highest durability, across all attack types (not shown here), and especially in the single-frame setting (e.g. screenshots).
Overall Score
The overall ranking of tested watermarks, based on our composite score, is as follows:
pawprint.video
94
pixelseal.bch44
86
videoseal.bch128
86
competitor est.
80
legacy est.
60
rivagan
56
Most video watermarking systems are not public, so we cannot easily test them. Based on our knowledge, we estimate that traditional commercial systems score around 60 while those with strong AI/ML teams score around 80.
