Splats in Splats: Embedding Invisible 3D Watermark within Gaussian Splatting

Yijia Guo^1*, Wenkai Huang^2,3*, Yang Li¹, Gaolei Li^2,3,, Hang Zhang⁵, Liwen Hu¹, Jianhua Li^2,3, Tiejun Huang¹, Lei Ma^1,4,

¹National Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University ²School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University ³Shanghai Key Laboratory of Integrated Administration Technologies for Information Security, Shanghai Jiao Tong University ⁴National Biomedical Imaging Center, Peking University ⁵Cornell University ^*Equal Contribution, Corresponding Author

Code Arxiv

Abstract

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive 3D reconstruction performance with explicit scene representations. Given the widespread application of 3DGS in 3D reconstruction and generation tasks, there is an urgent need to protect the copyright of 3DGS assets. However, existing copyright protection techniques for 3DGS overlook the usability of 3D assets, posing challenges for practical deployment. Here we describe WaterGS, the first 3DGS watermarking framework that embeds 3D content in 3DGS itself without modifying any attributes of the vanilla 3DGS. To achieve this, we take a deep insight into spherical harmonics (SH) and devise an importance-graded SH coefficient encryption strategy to embed the hidden SH coefficients. Furthermore, we employ a convolutional autoencoder to establish a mapping between the original Gaussian primitives' opacity and the hidden Gaussian primitives' opacity. Extensive experiments indicate that WaterGS significantly outperforms existing 3D steganography techniques, with 5.31% higher scene fidelity and 3X faster rendering speed, while ensuring security, robustness, and user experience.