Invisible Watermarks

Watermarking has improved immensely with neural networks; native AI/ML research is needed to stay competitive nowadays. We benchmarked every open-source and commercial watermark we could obtain, using a holistic “practical” evaluation, and PawPrint handily took first place in each benchmark we ran — the fastest to decode, thanks to bespoke compact neural network architectures, with a false-positive rate (on detecting a watermark when none exists) far lower than other watermarking schemes. PawPrint also wins handily on durability and matches the state-of-the-art on imperceptibility, making it especially well-suited for content provenance applications. Details are in the PawPrint model report.

Trufo provides enterprise-trusted forensic watermarking & C2PA soft-binding solutions using its watermarking technology.

Customers using the Trufo Signing API can enable the watermark per signing request. Both hosted (watermarking done on server) and distributed (watermarking done locally via SDK) are supported. When C2PA metadata is lost (e.g. stripped), the watermark survives, and can be used by validators to recover the lost provenance.

The Trufo soft-binding service is available to companies building their own Generator Products, using ai.trufo.pawprint.watermark as the soft-binding ID for validator interoperability. Both API and local SDK are supported.

The Local SDK

The watermarking SDK ships with trufo-py, Trufo's open-source Python library, and works in both modes: alongside the C2PA Signing API for distributed signing, or on its own with the standalone bind routes (bind_watermark, bind_reserve) when you sign with your own certificate. Enabling a watermark is one action in the sign call:

from pathlib import Path

from trufo import sign_c2pa_test
from trufo.util.credentials import TrufoAPIKey, load_api_key

api_key = load_api_key(TrufoAPIKey.C2PA_SIGN_TEST)

media_bytes = Path("input.jpg").read_bytes()
signed_bytes = sign_c2pa_test(
    api_key,
    media_bytes,
    actions=[["watermark", {}]],
)

See the watermarking quickstart for more details on settings and format support.

EU AI Act Compliance

Article 50(2) requires AI-generated content to carry a machine-readable, imperceptible, and interoperable watermark. For companies seeking minimal compliance with the EU AI Act Article 50(2), per-AI-system watermarking embeds a single watermark ID in all content a registered AI system generates. The AI system can be identified, but individual content provenance records (e.g. C2PA soft-binding) cannot.

Forensic Tracking

For copyright tracking and leak tracing, per-embed watermarking keeps a live registry record for each watermarked file. Content found in the wild — recompressed, cropped, spliced — decodes back to the exact record you registered, with per-segment analysis available for edited media.

The $60/mo watermarking plan is complimentary with any C2PA signing plan, or available standalone. It includes 300 watermark ID units a month, and pricing scales well with usage. Head over to the Trufo App for more pricing details.

For enterprise pricing, please schedule a consultation.