ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

publication · 2026-05-27

A recent study presents a watermarking technique that remains unaffected by rotation for panoramic images. This method conceptualizes panoramas as spherical signals and employs SO(3) representation theory to create descriptors that are demonstrably rotation-invariant. Although spherical harmonic coefficients undergo equivariant transformations with rotations, current invariant methods are restricted to zeroth-order statistics, which discard directional data and limit embedding capacity. The innovative approach utilizes a third-order invariant construction by linking higher-order SO(3) irreducible representations through tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation, thus facilitating resilient watermarking against any 3D rotations.

Key facts

  • The paper is published on arXiv with ID 2605.26702.
  • It addresses the challenge of reliable watermarking for panoramic imagery under arbitrary 3D rotations.
  • Panoramas are defined on the sphere and transform under the action of SO(3).
  • Conventional planar representations and augmentation-based strategies lack theoretical guarantees.
  • Spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations.
  • Natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics.
  • Zeroth-order statistics eliminate directional information and constrain embedding capacity.
  • The method introduces a third-order invariant construction using tensor products of higher-order SO(3) irreducible representations.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv

Sources