Do You Steal My Model? Signature Diffusion Embedded Dual-Verification Watermarking for Protecting Intellectual Property of Hyperspectral Image Classification Models

Do You Steal My Model? Signature Diffusion Embedded Dual-Verification Watermarking for Protecting Intellectual Property of Hyperspectral Image Classification Models

Yufei Yang, Song Xiao, Lixiang Li, Wenqian Dong, Jiahui Qu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2233-2241. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/249

Due to the high cost of data collection and training, the well-performed hyperspectral image (HSI) classification models are of great value and vulnerable to piracy threat during transmission and use. Model watermarking is a promising technology for intellectual property (IP) protection of models. However, the existing model watermarking methods for RGB image classification models ignore the complexity of ground objects and high dimension of HSIs, which makes trigger samples easy to be detected and forged. To address this problem, we propose a signature diffusion embedded dual-verification watermarking method, which generates imperceptible trigger samples with explicit owner information to achieve dual verification of both model ownership and legality of trigger set. Specifically, the subpixel-space owner signature diffusion incorporated imperceptible trigger set generation method is proposed to manipulate owner signature incorporated to the abundance matrix of seeds via diffusion model in subpixel space, thus balancing the perceptual quality of trigger samples and signature extraction capability. To resist ownership confusion, dual-stamp ownership verification is proposed to query the suspicious model with trigger samples for ownership verification, and further extracts signature from trigger samples to guarantee their legality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed method can effectively protect IP of HSI classification models.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)
AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness: ETF: Safety and robustness