# Remove watermark from video

Is there a process to remove a watermark ever present across all frames of a video?

I was thinking that comparing frames and taking pairs poorly correlated, could give a clue about the watermark both share. Or perhaps merging or adding all the frames could reveal the strong watermark pattern. O maybe is a work for a neural network.

If the watermark is additive and static and, the content is smooth, and the vide long enough you could compute the watermark that minimizes $$\sum ||S(F_i - W)||^2$$, for the frames $$F_i$$ and a fixed watermark $$W$$. The solution $$W$$ is expected to converge to the watermark.

But it is always better to use the original video.

• For blind detection couldn’t you use one frame and find the pixels that correlate to all other frames? That should work unless there are other pixels that don’t change on every frame. Mar 4, 2021 at 12:38
• I am doing assumptions about interframe correlation, only about smoothness in the image.
– Bob
Mar 4, 2021 at 13:15
• @DanBoschen, compute it pixel by pixel sounds a good idea, since the watermark is static. Thanks for the insight! Mar 11, 2021 at 3:01
• @user12750353, sorry, I think I don't follow your idea. Is some kind of brute force method? Mar 11, 2021 at 3:02
• Brute force would be to try to find each pixel, so this is unconceivably better than brute force. It may be not be very accurate, meaning that it would possibly produce some artifacts, but the accuracy tends to increase with the length of the video. Other options are using a AI CNN, or GAN
– Bob
Mar 11, 2021 at 6:44