remove-ai-watermarks/CLAUDE.md

Remove-AI-Watermarks

You are a principal Python engineer maintaining a CLI tool and library for removing visible and invisible AI watermarks from images.

How to run

• uv run remove-ai-watermarks all <image.png> -o <output.png>
• uv run remove-ai-watermarks visible <image.png> -o <out.png> — visible-mark removal, CPU, no GPU. --mark auto (default) routes between the Gemini sparkle and the Doubao "豆包AI生成" text strip by detector confidence; --mark gemini / --mark doubao force one.
• uv run remove-ai-watermarks erase <image.png> --region x,y,w,h -o <out.png> — universal region eraser (any logo/object, any position). --backend cv2 (default, no deps) or --backend lama (big-LaMa via onnxruntime, extra lama); --region is repeatable.
• uv run remove-ai-watermarks identify <image> — provenance verdict (platform + watermark inventory + confidence); --json for machine output, --no-visible to skip the cv2 sparkle detector
• uv run remove-ai-watermarks metadata <image.png> --check — inspect AI metadata (C2PA, EXIF, PNG chunks)
• uv run remove-ai-watermarks metadata <image.png> --remove -o <out.png> — strip all AI metadata

Test and lint

• bash maintain.sh — uv-outdated, uv-secure, ruff check/fix, ruff format, pyright, pytest -n auto
• maintain.sh may not finish fully green (pre-existing, not per-change): strict pyright carries debt in remove_ai_metadata / cli.py (untyped piexif/PIL/click/rich). (uv-secure is clean since idna was bumped 3.11 -> 3.16, fixing GHSA-65pc-fj4g-8rjx.) To gate a change, run uv run ruff check, uv run pyright <changed files>, uv run pytest directly.
• Run uv run from the repo root — from another cwd it falls back to a bare env without numpy/cv2/torch.
• To add a dev tool (pytest/ruff/pyright) into the env, use uv sync --frozen --extra dev --extra gpu, never uv pip install — uv pip install re-resolves and rewrites uv.lock, which silently bumped transformers to a build incompatible with the pinned diffusers (cannot import name 'Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration') and broke every identify/metadata import. Recovery: git checkout uv.lock && uv sync --frozen --extra gpu --extra dev. The gpu extra holds diffusers/transformers/torch, so a bare uv sync (no extras) removes them and noai/__init__ (eager pipeline import) then fails. maintain.sh's uv sync --all-extras also pulls the heavy trustmark/lama wheels (pytorch-lightning, onnxruntime) — fine on a good connection, but on flaky DNS sync only --extra gpu --extra dev and run the lint/test steps by hand.
• Metadata/C2PA tests assert against real committed fixtures in data/samples/ (chatgpt-*.png = OpenAI C2PA, firefly-1.png = Adobe, mj-* = Midjourney IPTC, doubao-1.png = ByteDance Doubao with the China TC260 <TC260:AIGC> XMP label and a visible "豆包AI生成" text mark bottom-right; grok-1.jpg = xAI Grok with its EXIF-only Signature: blob + UUID Artist and no C2PA/SynthID/IPTC); synthetic byte blobs cover the JPEG/ISOBMFF format paths. The "non-AI / clean photo" control is no longer in data/samples/ -- the clean_photo conftest fixture serves a verified-negative image from the corpus neg/ set (skips if the corpus is absent).
• SynthID reference corpus: scripts/synthid_corpus.py ingests labeled images into data/synthid_corpus/. The labeled images/ (pos/ neg/ cleaned/) are committed (public repo -- review every image for private content before adding; manifest.csv is kept in sync with the files on disk, one row per tracked image); only the synthetic refs/ calibration fills are gitignored. See its README for the collection protocol and verification oracles.

Configuration

• GPU/ML modules (invisible_engine, ctrlregen, watermark_remover) are optional — guard imports with is_available() checks
• Optional detection extras: detect (imwatermark — open SD/SDXL/FLUX watermark) and trustmark (Adobe TrustMark decoder; pulls torch + downloads weights). Both are guarded by is_available() and skipped by identify when absent.
• Tests for the model-running paths are limited to availability checks (multi-GB downloads). But the pure helpers inside ML-adjacent modules are unit-tested without any download and must stay that way: _target_size (native-vs-downscale, test_invisible_engine.py), the MPS->CPU fallback control flow via mocked pipelines (test_img2img_runner.py, 100% cover), and the tiling math tile_positions/make_blend_weight/resize_center_crop (test_tiling.py; pytest.importorskip("torch") since tiling.py imports torch at module top). Don't skip these as "ML, needs a model" — only run_tiled/remove_watermark/the diffusion bodies do.

Key modules

• noai/c2pa.py — PNG chunk parser; use extract_c2pa_chunk(path) to get raw caBX payload, has_c2pa_metadata(path) to detect. Do not reimplement chunk parsing. extract_c2pa_info(path) sets synthid_watermark/synthid_vendors when the manifest is signed by a SynthID-using vendor, and soft_binding/soft_binding_vendors when a c2pa.soft-binding alg names a forensic-watermark vendor (soft_binding_vendors_in(buffer) is the shared byte-scan, used by both the PNG parser and the non-PNG binary path).
• noai/constants.py — PNG_SIGNATURE, C2PA_CHUNK_TYPE, C2PA_SIGNATURES, C2PA_ISSUERS, SYNTHID_C2PA_ISSUERS (issuers that pair SynthID with C2PA: Google, OpenAI), and C2PA_SOFT_BINDINGS (soft-binding alg prefix → forensic-watermark vendor: Adobe TrustMark, Digimarc, Imatag, Steg.AI, Microsoft, ...). Add a new issuer/binding here, not inline.
• metadata.py — scan_head(path, size=1MB) is the shared input for every C2PA/AIGC/IPTC byte scan: first size bytes plus, for ISOBMFF, the late provenance-box payloads from isobmff.scan_c2pa_region (catches a manifest after a large mdat); behavior-neutral (f.read(size)) for non-ISOBMFF. Use it instead of open().read(1MB) for any new marker scan. synthid_source(path) returns the vendor name(s) if the C2PA manifest implies a SynthID pixel watermark, else None. Format-agnostic: PNG via the caBX parser, JPEG/WebP/AVIF/HEIF/JXL via a binary scan (C2PA marker + SynthID issuer + AI-source marker). get_ai_metadata surfaces the verdict, and metadata --check prints it as a callout. Both get_ai_metadata and has_ai_metadata guard the PIL open with except Exception (HEIC/unknown formats raise non-OSError) and fall through to the binary scan. xai_signature(path) detects xAI/Grok's EXIF-only scheme (ImageDescription = Signature: <base64> + UUID Artist); it feeds has_ai_metadata, get_ai_metadata (key xai_signature), and identify. iptc_ai_system(path) detects the IPTC Photo Metadata 2025.1 AI-disclosure XMP properties (IPTC_AI_FIELD_MARKERS = AISystemUsed/AISystemVersionUsed/AIPromptInformation/AIPromptWriterName) and returns the AISystemUsed generator name (or "fields present"). remove_ai_metadata routes ISOBMFF video (.mp4/.mov/.m4v) through the same isobmff.strip_c2pa_boxes as AVIF/HEIF (MP4 is ISOBMFF), and _scrub_ai_exif removes the xAI signature + AI-generator EXIF tags on JPEG output.
• identify.py — identify(path) aggregates every locally-readable signal (C2PA issuer→platform, C2PA soft-binding forensic-watermark vendor, IPTC "Made with AI" + IPTC 2025.1 AISystemUsed, embedded SD/ComfyUI params, SynthID proxy, xAI/Grok EXIF signature via metadata.xai_signature, the China TC260 AIGC label via metadata.aigc_label, the HuggingFace hf-job-id job marker via metadata.huggingface_job, visible Gemini sparkle, open invisible watermark, Adobe TrustMark via trustmark_detector) into one ProvenanceReport. is_ai_generated is True or None (never asserted False — stripped metadata is not proof of clean origin). The hf_job and visible-sparkle signals are medium confidence: each lifts an otherwise-Unknown verdict to a tentative AI (hf_only / visible_only, parallel branches) but is excluded from the high-confidence ai_from_metadata set, so neither overrides a hard metadata signal. Visible-sparkle is promoted only at confidence ≥ _SPARKLE_THRESHOLD (0.5; corpus-tuned to separate Gemini sparkles ≥0.56 from non-sparkle ≤0.49). The cv2 dependency lives in gemini_engine.detect_sparkle_confidence, not here. C2PA platform attribution is device-token-first, issuer-scan fallback (_device_platform scans manifest bytes for _DEVICE_C2PA_PLATFORM tokens, then _attribute_platform/_ISSUER_PLATFORM). Why, verified on real signed files 2026-05-26: the old issuer-only byte-scan matched ANY issuer substring anywhere, so multi-entity manifests mis-attributed -- Leica→"Truepic" (a signing authority in the trust chain), Nikon→"Adobe Firefly" (XMP-toolkit "Adobe" + the sample's "Adobe_MAX" name), Pixel→"Google (Gemini)" ("Google LLC" cert org), Truepic→"Google". A distinctive device token wins instead. Token distinctiveness is load-bearing: bare b"Truepic" mis-fires (it appears in unrelated trust chains -- it mis-attributed the OpenAI chatgpt-1.png fixture), so the token is the specific b"Truepic_Lens" from the Lens SDK claim generator; likewise b"Pixel Camera" (cert CN) not bare b"Pixel". _DEVICE_C2PA_PLATFORM lists ONLY tokens verified against a real C2PA file: Leica (lc_c2pa/Leica Camera), Nikon (NIKON), Pixel (Pixel Camera -- from a real Pixel 10 Pro file attached to c2pa-rs issue #1609/#1554), Sony (sony.sig/sony.cert -- Sony's own C2PA assertion namespace, verified on a real Sony PXW-Z300 file; NOT bare "Sony" which is a common EXIF Make), Truepic (Truepic_Lens). Canon/Samsung/Bria have no public direct-download C2PA sample (checked exhaustively: GitHub issue/PR attachments, contentcredentials gallery, HF datasets -- all upload-to-verify or token-gated; Canon's only public file was a self-signed hobbyist CR3, not factory), so they stay unmapped until a real file is captured (same fixture discipline as Grok/Doubao). The Sony sample is video (MP4) -- our ISOBMFF C2PA path detects it; Sony Alpha stills likely share the sony.* namespace but are not separately verified. Camera C2PA marks capture authenticity, not AI (Pixel carries computationalCapture, not trainedAlgorithmicMedia), so these never set is_ai -- that stays driven by digital-source-type. c2pa.cbor_text_after (now public) is best-effort for the generator detail string only and can be None when the manifest keys it claim_generator_info (Pixel). Issuer→generator mapping is is_ai-gated (_attribute_platform(issuers, is_ai=c2pa_is_ai)): a specific AI-generator platform is named only when the digital-source-type is trainedAlgorithmicMedia; on a non-AI source an issuer substring is treated as incidental (an "Adobe XMP" toolkit string in an unmapped Canon/Sony capture would otherwise mislabel it "Adobe Firefly"), so it degrades to the neutral "C2PA signer: X" label. Real Firefly/OpenAI/Google output carries the AI source-type, so it is unaffected (verified: chatgpt-1.png→OpenAI, firefly-1.png→Adobe Firefly still attribute). _attribute_platform defaults is_ai=True so the mapping stays unit-testable in isolation. Add device tokens to _DEVICE_C2PA_PLATFORM, generator/issuer platforms to _ISSUER_PLATFORM, not inline. For non-PNG containers (JPEG/WebP/AVIF/HEIF/JXL) the caBX parser returns nothing, so issuer (_issuers_in) and generator (_ai_tools_in, reusing C2PA_AI_TOOLS) are recovered by binary-scanning the first MB. EXIF Software / Make / Artist / ImageDescription and XMP CreatorTool generator tags are read by metadata.exif_generator (PIL+piexif for any format PIL opens incl. AVIF, plus a container-agnostic XMP raw-byte scan that also covers HEIF/JXL), matched against AI_GENERATOR_TOKENS so ordinary editors (plain "Adobe Photoshop") and real-camera Make ("Apple"/"Canon") are not flagged. Ideogram tags its output with EXIF Make="Ideogram AI" (verified on a real download 2026-05-24) — that's why Make is read. Integrity-clash detection (_integrity_clashes, surfaced as ProvenanceReport.integrity_clashes, printed in red by identify and serialized to --json): contradictions between independent generator stamps are a laundering/spoofing tell. Two rules: (1) two or more distinct AI-origin vendors named by independent signals (e.g. C2PA OpenAI + EXIF Make="Ideogram AI"), and (2) a camera-capture C2PA device (_DEVICE_C2PA_PLATFORM) coexisting with any AI-generation marker. Vendor normalization is _vendor_of over _AI_VENDOR_TOKENS (so a C2PA "Google (Gemini)" issuer and a SynthID-Google proxy agree, while different vendors clash). High-precision by design: only hard generator stamps feed it (C2PA-issuer when source is AI, SynthID, EXIF/XMP generator, IPTC AISystemUsed, xAI, AIGC); the fuzzy visible sparkle and the open invisible watermark are excluded (the latter can be a by-product of our own SDXL removal pass). The c2pa vendor is classified from the issuer attribution / generator, NOT the resolved platform (a camera label like "Google Pixel" would mis-normalize to "Google"). All real single-origin fixtures (chatgpt/firefly/doubao/grok/mj) verified to produce zero clashes (false-positive guard in test_identify.py::TestRealSamplesHaveNoClash).
• gemini_engine.py — visible Gemini-sparkle remover/detector (cv2/numpy, no GPU). detect_sparkle_confidence(path) is the file-level entry point used by identify.py.
• doubao_engine.py — visible Doubao "豆包AI生成" remover/detector (cv2/numpy, no GPU). DoubaoEngine.locate anchors a bottom-right box by geometry (mark scales with image WIDTH, fractions in module constants; no bundled template), extract_mask pulls the light low-saturation glyphs with a polarity-aware white top-hat (brighter-than-blurred-local-bg, so white-paper documents are left untouched instead of smeared), detect thresholds glyph coverage (DETECT_MIN_COVERAGE 0.16 separates real marks ≥0.20 from corner noise, which stays ≤0.06 on large images but can spike to ~0.15 on tiny ones), remove_watermark inpaints (cv2 Telea/NS) and bails when coverage > MAX_INPAINT_COVERAGE 0.50 (dense-text background → would smear). Wired into visible --mark via cli._run_doubao_if_selected. Logo is near-white (~253), not the gray some third-party tools assume. Best on photo/illustration backgrounds; high-contrast edges leave faint residue (cv2-inpaint limit). Clean per-pixel reverse-alpha (Gemini-style) is the future upgrade but needs a captured/distilled alpha map — see below.
• region_eraser.py — universal region eraser (erase CLI). erase(image, boxes=|mask=, backend=): boxes_to_mask → cv2.inpaint (cv2 backend, default, no deps) or big-LaMa via onnxruntime (lama backend, extra lama, Carve/LaMa-ONNX Apache-2.0 model downloaded on first use, never bundled). erase_lama crops a padded region around the mask, runs LaMa at its fixed 512² input, pastes only masked pixels back (untouched areas stay pixel-exact). Lazy _get_lama_session singleton; lama_available() guards the optional import. LaMa-ONNX costs ~3.5-4 GB peak RAM and ~5-6 s/call on CPU (FFC working set, not arena — enable_cpu_mem_arena=False does not help), so it does NOT fit a minimal droplet; the cv2 backend (tens of MB, ~30 ms) does. LaMa quality at low RAM = serverless/GPU, mirroring how raiw.cc offloads SDXL to fal.
• invisible_watermark.py — detect_invisible_watermark(path) decodes the OPEN DWT-DCT watermarks (public decoder, no key) embedded by Stable Diffusion / SDXL / FLUX via the imwatermark library. Known fixed patterns (verified against upstream source) live in _BITS_48 (SDXL 48-bit, FLUX.2 48-bit) and _SD1_STRING ("StableDiffusionV1", SD 1.x/2.x). Optional dep (extra detect); returns None when absent. The detect extra pulls torch transitively (invisible-watermark declares torch a hard dep, and WatermarkDecoder eagerly imports rivaGan -> torch at import time), so detection needs torch present even though dwtDct runs CPU-only on cv2/numpy/pywavelets — no GPU and no separate gpu extra required. Unlike SynthID this is locally detectable, but the watermark is fragile (does not survive JPEG re-encode/resize — verified gone after JPEG q90), so it confirms origin only on pristine files. Add new known patterns here. The file carries a top-of-module pyright pragma because imwatermark/cv2 ship no type stubs.
• trustmark_detector.py — detect_trustmark(path) decodes the OPEN, keyless Adobe TrustMark watermark (the soft binding behind Adobe Durable Content Credentials, alg com.adobe.trustmark.P) via the optional trustmark package (extra trustmark; pulls torch, downloads model weights on first use). Mirrors invisible_watermark.py (lazy singleton, top-of-module pyright pragma, returns None when absent). It detects provenance, not AI origin as such (TrustMark also marks human-authored content), so identify lists it as a watermark without setting is_ai_generated. Other soft-binding vendors (Digimarc/Imatag/Steg.AI/...) have no public decoder — they are only named via the C2PA_SOFT_BINDINGS scan, not decoded.
• text_protector.py — text-region protection for the invisible SDXL img2img pass (issue #21: CJK/small text deforms at watermark-removal strengths). is_available() gates on cv2.dnn.TextDetectionModel_DB; TextProtector.detect_text_boxes(bgr) runs the PP-OCRv3 CN ONNX detector (~2.4 MB, Apache-2.0, opencv_zoo, CJK-native, returns rotated quad polygons) — downloaded+cached to ~/.cache/remove-ai-watermarks on first use via atomic temp-rename, never bundled, no torch (cv2.dnn only). build_change_map(boxes, h, w, preserve=0.9, feather=15) paints a Differential-Diffusion change map. Polarity (verified empirically): white(1.0)=PRESERVE original pixels, black(0.0)=MAX change; map is black bg + preserve inside text polygons, Gaussian-feathered edges, clipped to [0,1]. preserve stays below a hard 1.0 freeze by default so text still scrubs lightly (SynthID survives cropping). Wired into watermark_remover._run_differential via the community pipeline_stable_diffusion_xl_differential_img2img (loaded with custom_revision="0.38.0" — HF resolves the PyPI version string, not the v0.38.0 git tag); gated to the SDXL DEFAULT_MODEL_ID only (_can_protect_text), falls back to plain img2img otherwise. Autonomous by default (protect_text=True in invisible_engine/watermark_remover, mirroring protect_faces): the detector runs per image and _run_differential falls back to plain img2img when no boxes are found, so text-free inputs pay only the cheap cv2 detection (no differential-pipeline load). CLI exposes a single off-switch --no-protect-text on invisible/all (passed as protect_text=not no_protect_text); the unavailable-model case logs at debug, not warning, since it is now the default path. The diff pipeline upcasts the VAE to fp32 internally, so do not add upcast_vae()/enable_attention_slicing (both produced NaN/black on fp16 MPS). build_change_map is unit-tested without any model download (tests/test_text_protector.py).
• face_protector.py — YOLO detect + soft-blend pattern; mirror this for any "protect region during diffusion" features
• image_io.py — Unicode-safe cv2 IO (issue #17). imread(path, flags=None) / imwrite(path, img) wrap np.fromfile+cv2.imdecode / cv2.imencode+tofile so non-ASCII paths work on Windows -- bare cv2.imread/cv2.imwrite use the platform ANSI code-page API there and fail (empty decode + can't open/read file) on Chinese/Cyrillic/accented filenames. imread keeps cv2.imread semantics (defaults to IMREAD_COLOR, returns None on missing/empty/undecodable). Every cv2 file read/write in the package routes through here; do not call cv2.imread/cv2.imwrite directly. macOS/Linux already accept UTF-8 paths, so it is behavior-neutral there (the bug only reproduces on Windows). cv2/numpy are imported lazily inside the functions, so the module is cheap to import in a bare env.

Doubao clean-reverse-alpha distillation (researched 2026-05-26, NOT yet shipped)

Plan to get Gemini-style pixel-accurate reverse-alpha for Doubao at cv2 cost (so it runs on a minimal CPU droplet): use LaMa offline to reconstruct the clean background O, then per-pixel solve I=(1-α)O+αL for the alpha map + logo colour (this is Google's CVPR-2017 multi-image idea, with LaMa standing in for the multi-image optimisation). Validated in principle (glyph error drops as alignment improves) but blocked on data, confirmed empirically over 6 attempts: a clean canonical alpha map needs several PRISTINE images at ONE resolution with varied backgrounds. The findable public Doubao images (ayaya, Tools_CleanMark, ours) are all different resolutions AND lossy (jpg/webp), and Doubao's mark position drifts ~±50 px even at the same resolution, so cross-image registration (ECC / phase-correlation) fails (1/11 templates aligned) — error floor ~64/255 on glyph pixels, not shippable. To finish: ~5-8 pristine same-resolution Doubao originals → per-image α via LaMa → align the clean α templates → median → ship the tiny map + an NCC localiser (Doubao's mark drifts, so runtime needs the same locate-then-reverse-alpha the Gemini engine already does). Don't retry on lossy/mixed-resolution scraped images — proven insufficient.

Watermarking landscape (research 2026-05-24)

Who embeds what, and whether it is locally detectable (so we know which gaps are fillable). See identify.py for what we read.

• Locally detectable (open decoder, no key/API): Stable Diffusion / SDXL / FLUX via imwatermark DWT-DCT (now covered by invisible_watermark.py). FLUX uses the same library (black-forest-labs/flux2 src/flux2/watermark.py, 48-bit 0b001010101111111010000111100111001111010100101110); SDXL is the diffusers WATERMARK_MESSAGE (0b101100111110110010010000011110111011000110011110). Caveat: fragile to re-encoding.
• C2PA / IPTC (covered by the issuer/marker scan): OpenAI, Google, Adobe Firefly, Microsoft (Designer + Bing Image Creator — collected 2026-05-24; Bing now runs Microsoft's own MAI-Image model, signs C2PA as "Microsoft", NOT OpenAI/DALL-E), and Stability AI (collected from Brand Studio / DreamStudio successor; signs C2PA as "Stability AI Ltd", no SynthID, no imwatermark on its current Stable Image model — issuer added to C2PA_ISSUERS). Still unsampled: Canva (its downloads are re-encoded design exports that strip C2PA, so a Canva "positive" is inconclusive — skipped), Getty, Shutterstock. Midjourney embeds NO C2PA and no invisible watermark (our mj-* sample carried only the IPTC tag).
• EXIF/XMP generator tag (caught by exif_generator): Ideogram writes EXIF Make="Ideogram AI" (collected 2026-05-24 — no C2PA, no SynthID, no imwatermark; the Make tag is the only signal).
• xAI / Grok — its own EXIF signature scheme, NOT C2PA (DETECTED by metadata.xai_signature, built 2026-05-26). Grok JPEG downloads (Aurora model) carry no C2PA, no XMP, no SynthID, no IPTC — only EXIF Artist = a UUID and EXIF ImageDescription = Signature: <base64> (a crypto signature, unverifiable locally without xAI's public key). This empirically kills the earlier unverified "xAI signs C2PA as xAI" lead — xAI is not even a C2PA member. exif_generator misses it (neither field holds an AI_GENERATOR_TOKENS token), so a dedicated detector xai_signature(path) matches the pair (ImageDescription ~ ^Signature: [A-Za-z0-9+/=]{64,} AND UUID Artist); wired into has_ai_metadata, get_ai_metadata (key xai_signature), and identify (signal xai_signature, platform "xAI (Grok / Aurora)"). Format confirmed stable across n=3 genuine generations: exactly three EXIF tags (Artist, ExifOffset, ImageDescription), Signature: prefix constant, base64 payload 300-1004 chars. Two capture facts: (a) the Artist UUID equals the public image id in the asset URL (https://imagine-public.x.ai/imagine-public/images/<uuid>.jpg), so it is NOT a private per-user secret — only the Signature blob is; (b) the Grok web-UI image is a re-encoded WebP with no signature — the EXIF survives only in the original JPEG (download button or that public tokenless URL), which is why screenshots / re-encodes are metadata-stripped. A real fixture data/samples/grok-1.jpg plus synthetic JPEG fixtures (fake UUID + fake Signature: blob) cover the detector; never add a real Grok image carrying private content (the repo is public). Stripped on removal too: remove_ai_metadata now calls _scrub_ai_exif on the JPEG EXIF, which deletes the xAI Signature+UUID-Artist pair and any Software/Make/Artist/ImageDescription tag holding an AI_GENERATOR_TOKENS token (so Ideogram's Make="Ideogram AI" is scrubbed too), while keeping genuine camera/editor EXIF. The shared _is_xai_signature_pair helper (module-level compiled regexes) is the single source of truth for the pattern, used by both xai_signature and _scrub_ai_exif. (AVIF/HEIF/JXL still strip only C2PA boxes via isobmff, not EXIF — unchanged.)
• China TC260 AIGC label (caught by AIGC_MARKERS / metadata.aigc_label, surfaced by identify as the aigc signal): China-served generators embed an XMP <TC260:AIGC>{"Label":"1","ContentProducer":...} block — China's mandatory AI-content labeling (TC260 namespace tc260.org.cn/ns/AIGC). Doubao (ByteDance) uses it (verified on the real #13 sample 2026-05-25; ContentProducer 001191110102MACQD9K64010000, no C2PA/SynthID/imwatermark — the XMP block is the only signal; GitHub attachment upload did NOT strip it). The same standard is mandatory for Jimeng/Kling/Qwen/Ernie etc., so the one marker covers the whole China-AIGC-labeled ecosystem. aigc_label reads two serializations through a shared _parse helper: the HTML-entity-encoded XMP <TC260:AIGC> block (container-agnostic raw-byte scan, any JSON object accepted) and a raw-JSON PNG AIGC tEXt chunk — Doubao also writes the label this way, with no namespaced marker at all (confirmed on the corpus 2026-05-28, ContentProducer="doubao"). The PNG-chunk path is gated on at least one TC260 field (_TC260_FIELDS) so a generic AIGC key cannot false-positive. In identify, aigc fires on the parsed label or the AIGC_MARKERS byte scan (the latter preserves the laundering-tell case where the JSON payload is truncated).
• HuggingFace-hosted job (caught by metadata.huggingface_job, surfaced by identify as the hf_job signal, MEDIUM confidence): HuggingFace Jobs / Spaces stamp generated PNGs with an hf-job-id tEXt chunk holding the job UUID (3 on the corpus 2026-05-28, no other signal). It marks the hosting job, not a model — most commonly diffusion output — so it lifts an Unknown verdict to a tentative AI via hf_only (parallel to the visible sparkle) but never overrides a hard metadata signal; _HF_JOB_CAVEAT states the limit (job, not model; not proof of AI pixels). Stripped on removal (the PNG save whitelist keeps only STANDARD_METADATA_KEYS, so hf-job-id and the AIGC chunk are both dropped). The exact writer is not authoritatively documented (HF Jobs are generic GPU jobs), hence medium not high.
• No detectable signal on download (correctly reported unknown): Recraft (PNG export is a re-encoded design export — strips everything), Krea hosting FLUX 2 (no imwatermark despite FLUX — the host omits the encoder, same as Stability's hosted SDXL), and Midjourney (embeds nothing). Lesson: the imwatermark detector only fires on pristine output from a pipeline that runs the encoder (diffusers default, official BFL), not from re-hosts (Krea/Stability) or re-encoded exports (Recraft/Canva).
• Invisible but NOT locally detectable (proprietary, API/oracle only — same wall as SynthID): Amazon Titan Image Generator + Nova Canvas (Bedrock DetectGeneratedContent API), Kakao (new SynthID image adopter, May 2026), NVIDIA Cosmos (SynthID video). No local detector possible; treat like SynthID.
• C2PA 2.4 "Durable Content Credentials" (April 2026; verified against the spec) raise the bar for metadata stripping. 2.4 defines soft bindings (an invisible watermark or a content fingerprint) plus a server-side manifest repository and a new c2pa.repository-receipt assertion. Per the spec: "if a C2PA manifest is removed from an asset, but a copy of that manifest remains in a provenance store elsewhere, the manifest and asset may be matched using available soft bindings." So our local metadata --remove deletes the embedded manifest, but a fingerprint/watermark soft binding can still re-link the image to its manifest in a repository server-side. Stripping the file is becoming necessary-but-not-sufficient against durable provenance. (Our parsers target the stable embedded-manifest format documented in C2PA 2.1 §11; that format is unchanged in 2.4 -- the new pieces are repository/soft-binding infra, not the on-file box layout, so no parser change is implied.) Spec: https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.4/specs/C2PA_Specification.html We now READ the soft-binding alg (C2PA_SOFT_BINDINGS / soft_binding_vendors_in) to name the forensic-watermark vendor, and locally DECODE the one open scheme, Adobe TrustMark (trustmark_detector); the rest (Digimarc/Imatag/Steg.AI/...) stay name-only (proprietary decoders).
• Built 2026-05-26 (this batch): soft-binding alg vendor detection; IPTC Photo Metadata 2025.1 AI-disclosure fields (AISystemUsed etc.); video C2PA metadata detect + strip for MP4/MOV/M4V (free — isobmff.py is format-agnostic, MP4 is ISOBMFF); Adobe TrustMark open decoder. NOT done (out of cheap reach, per the feasibility review): visible video-logo removal (needs a video frame pipeline) and audio (SynthID/ElevenLabs/Resemble/Suno all oracle-only or unmarked). Box detection window — now handled (v0.6.8): detection no longer relies on a fixed first-MB read. metadata.scan_head(path, size) reads the first size bytes and, for ISOBMFF, appends the payloads of late provenance boxes found by isobmff.scan_c2pa_region (a file-seeking top-level box walker that skips past mdat by size without reading it), so a C2PA/AIGC/IPTC manifest placed AFTER a large mdat in a streaming/non-faststart MP4 is now caught. Every C2PA/marker byte scan (has_ai_metadata, aigc_label, iptc_ai_system, synthid_source, exif_generator XMP, get_ai_metadata soft-binding, and identify) goes through scan_head; it is behavior-neutral for non-ISOBMFF inputs (exactly f.read(size)). Meta-box XMP removal — now handled (v0.6.9): an AI-label XMP packet stored as a meta-box mime item (HEIF/AVIF; out of reach of the top-level box stripper) is blanked in place by isobmff.blank_ai_xmp_packets — it locates the packet by its <?xpacket begin … end?> delimiters and, if it carries an AI marker (_AI_LABEL_MARKERS), overwrites it with spaces of the SAME length, so box sizes / iloc offsets stay valid and the coded image is untouched (selective: plain non-AI XMP is left alone, mirroring the top-level uuid logic). Wired into remove_ai_metadata's ISOBMFF branch after strip_c2pa_boxes. The remaining gap is an Exif meta-box item (rare; the AI labels are XMP) — still needs iinf/iloc surgery or exiftool.
• Regulatory driver (context, not a code change): AI-content labeling mandates are expanding, which pushes more generators toward exactly the C2PA + watermark signals we read. The full per-jurisdiction table lives in README "## Legal" -- keep it there, not duplicated here. Newly added + primary-source verified 2026-05-26: EU AI Act Article 50 machine-readable marking applicable 2026-08-02 (verified against the article text); South Korea AI Framework Act Art. 31(3) in force since 22 January 2026 (verified via Kim & Chang + FPF/Korea Times; Enforcement Decree accepts an invisible-watermark label); California AB 853 (amends the CA AI Transparency Act) latent-disclosure duty operative 2026-08-02, requiring a disclosure "permanent or extraordinarily difficult to remove" (verified against the leginfo bill text -- this is the exact disclosure our tool strips); India IT Amendment Rules 2026 in force 2026-02-20 (verified via Chambers), which prominently-label + permanent-provenance-id all synthetic media AND expressly prohibit removing/suppressing the label or metadata -- the first major all-content removal ban outside China. Removal liability (README "## Legal" disclaimer): the tool is lawful general-purpose software; liability sits with the remover and is intent-gated -- downstream acts (fraud/deception/IP), plus US DMCA 17 USC 1202 (removing copyright-management info to conceal infringement), plus the removal-as-such bans in China + India. When extending the README table, verify each date/article against the statute/bill text before committing, not against search summaries.

Known limitations

• invisible pipeline processes at native resolution by default (max_resolution=0), matching the hosted raiw.cc backend (fal fast-sdxl, no pre-downscale). The old forced downscale-to-1024 -> upscale-back round-trip was the main quality loss (issue #10) and is gone; at strength ~0.05 SDXL img2img does not need the ~1024 downscale. --max-resolution N re-introduces an opt-in long-side cap purely to bound GPU/MPS memory on very large inputs (it reintroduces the lossy round-trip). For huge images that OOM at native, tile-based diffusion is still the proper long-term fix. Concrete MPS data point (verified 2026-05-25 on a 1254x1254 gpt-image SDXL run, fp32, 20 GB MPS ceiling): native res OOMs at the UNet step (peak ~17 GiB), not only the VAE decode, and the auto-fallback in img2img_runner reloads on CPU and finishes (slow, ~13 min) -- the output is still weight-identical and defeats SynthID, so "looks hung/crashed" on Mac is usually this CPU fallback, not a pipeline error. Adding enable_vae_tiling() alone does NOT prevent it (the peak is the UNet, not the VAE). The fast Mac workarounds are fp16 on MPS (roughly halves memory) or --max-resolution to cap the long side; neither is wired as the default. The native-vs-downscale decision lives in the pure helper invisible_engine._target_size(w, h, max_resolution) (returns None for native, a clamped target tuple otherwise) so it is unit-tested (tests/test_invisible_engine.py::TestTargetSize, the #10/#15 regression guard) without loading the model -- keep that logic in the helper, don't re-inline it.
• Pyright first run is slow (2-3 min) due to ML deps (torch/diffusers/transformers stubs); full-project uv run pyright can stall for many minutes — scope it to changed files.
• ultralytics monkey-patches PIL.Image.open and tries to autoload pi_heif. When pi_heif is missing, opening files raises ModuleNotFoundError, not UnidentifiedImageError. Code that opens user-supplied or unknown-format files should except Exception, not just OSError/UnidentifiedImageError.
• rich console.print parses [word] as a style tag and silently drops unknown ones. A literal bracketed token in a print string disappears: pip install 'remove-ai-watermarks[gpu]' rendered as ...remove-ai-watermarks' (the [gpu] extra eaten), which sent users a broken install command (surfaced via #19). Escape the literal bracket as \[gpu] (in a normal Python string that is "\\[gpu]") in any rich string carrying user-facing brackets. Regression-guarded by tests/test_cli.py::TestGpuHintMarkup.
• Metadata detection for AVIF/HEIF/JPEG-XL relies on a binary scan for C2PA_UUID + IPTC_AI_MARKERS, plus EXIF Software / XMP CreatorTool generator tags via metadata.exif_generator (validated with synthesized AVIF/JPEG fixtures + an XMP raw-scan fixture). C2PA removal in those containers is implemented via noai/isobmff.py (top-level uuid / jumb box stripper, no re-encoding), which now also drops a top-level XMP uuid box that carries an AI label (matched by AI-marker content, not by the XMP UUID, so byte-order-robust) and covers MP4/MOV/M4V/M4A by content sniff. Non-ISOBMFF audio/video removal is via ffmpeg (_FFMPEG_STRIP_EXTS -> _strip_with_ffmpeg): WebM/Matroska (EBML), MP3 (ID3), WAV/FLAC/OGG (RIFF/Vorbis) are stripped losslessly with ffmpeg -map_metadata -1 -map_chapters -1 -c copy (codec data untouched). Requires ffmpeg on PATH; raises RuntimeError if absent or if ffmpeg can't parse the file. Verified end-to-end (a real ffmpeg-made WAV/MP3 with a title=Suno AI tag -> tag gone, audio bytes preserved). Meta-box XMP now handled (isobmff.blank_ai_xmp_packets, v0.6.9): an AI-label XMP packet stored as a meta-box mime item (AVIF/HEIF) is blanked in place (overwritten with spaces of the same length, so iloc offsets and the coded image stay valid). Still NOT built: an Exif item inside the meta box (rare -- AI labels are XMP) needs full iinf/iloc surgery (offset rewrite) with corruption risk -- exiftool (R/W/C for HEIC/AVIF EXIF+XMP, verified on exiftool.org 2026-05-27) would do it but is a non-installed binary dep, so it stays a documented gap. Audio watermark DETECTION (Resemble PerTh) was evaluated and NOT built (2026-05-26): resemble-perth's PerthImplicitWatermarker.get_watermark() returns a raw bit-array with no presence/confidence flag (clean audio decodes to arbitrary bits too), so reliably distinguishing watermarked-from-clean needs either Resemble's fixed payload or a confidence API -- neither is public, and there's no real Resemble sample to calibrate against. Same wall-class as the SynthID pixel detector: the decode exists, reliable presence-detection does not. (perth's top-level PerthImplicitWatermarker is also gated to None unless librosa is importable.)
• SynthID detection is metadata-only. There is no reliable local detector of the SynthID pixel watermark — Google's decoder is proprietary, no public spec or API (only a waitlisted portal). Authoritative confirmation: Google DeepMind's own paper "SynthID-Image: Image watermarking at internet scale" (Gowal et al., arXiv:2510.09263) states the verification service is restricted to "trusted testers" and does not release detector weights or a reproducible algorithm — so a local pixel detector is infeasible by design, not just unbuilt. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263 We detect SynthID by its C2PA companion (synthid_source / SYNTHID_C2PA_ISSUERS), which is reliable while the manifest is intact but says nothing once C2PA is stripped. Surface-dependent blind spot (verified 2026-05-24): the same Google model emits different metadata per surface -- the Gemini app wraps outputs in Google C2PA, but the API/playground (AI Studio, Nano Banana / gemini-2.5-flash-image) emits the SynthID pixel watermark (confirmed via the Gemini-app oracle) + the visible sparkle but no C2PA/IPTC at all, so synthid_source returns None despite SynthID being present. Only the pixel oracle or the visible-sparkle detector catches those. (Meta AI is another surface mismatch: it writes the IPTC digitalSourceType=trainedAlgorithmicMedia marker, not C2PA and not SynthID.) Google→SynthID is long-standing; OpenAI→SynthID is confirmed by OpenAI's Help Center (ChatGPT/Codex/API "include both C2PA metadata and SynthID watermarks", updated 2026-05-21) but time-gated (pre-rollout OpenAI images carry C2PA without SynthID), so the OpenAI verdict is hedged "likely". Oracles: Gemini app "Verify with SynthID" (Google), openai.com/verify (OpenAI). The spectral phase-coherence approach from github.com/aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID was evaluated (May 2026) and does not work for real-content detection: on its own shipped codebook + validation set, watermarked and cleaned images were indistinguishable (conf within noise, cleaned often higher); it only fires on pure-black 1024x1024 reference images at exact resolution (the controlled case it was calibrated on). The README's "90% / conf=0.91" reproduces only in that lab condition. Do not build a production detector on it; if revisited, it is experimental/diagnostic only and needs a per-resolution, per-model reference corpus. A from-scratch gpt-image pilot (2026-05-24) confirmed this independently: 5 independent solid-black gpt-image outputs share a near-identical fixed signature (pairwise residual correlation 0.92, avg-template retains 97% energy), so the watermark/carrier IS strongly present and consistent on flat content — but the carrier frequencies extracted from it do NOT discriminate real content (carrier-to-random ratio: cleaned 1.86 > watermarked 1.53; a non-gpt-image image scored highest at 3.67). The signature drowns in content texture. Net: a perfectly consistent solid-color signature still yields no real-content pixel detector with magnitude/carrier methods. A corpus discrimination test (2026-05-24, scripts/synthid_pixel_probe.py, raw zero-mean residual NCC) independently re-confirms this: at matched resolution, SynthID positives do NOT cluster apart from negatives (within-Gemini 0.07; at 1024 px pos-vs-neg >= pos-vs-pos). The only high correlations were near-duplicate content (5 ChatGPT renders of one prompt at ~0.92, while a distinct ChatGPT image scored ~0 against them) — content, not a carrier. The probe is solid-fills-only and EXPERIMENTAL/DIAGNOSTIC; do not use it on real content. Correction (deeper re-examination 2026-05-25): the carrier IS real on solid fills — the earlier "no carrier" was a method artifact of using spatial / FFT-magnitude NCC, which can't see it. The carrier is a fixed phase at specific low frequencies, so the right metric is per-bin phase coherence. On 8 white gemini-2.5-flash-image fills (generated via the reverse-SynthID trick: identity-edit prompt "Recreate this image exactly as it is" on a synthetic pure-white PNG — this bypasses the recitation block that rejects text prompts for pure colors), phase coherence at the white carriers (0,±7..±12,±20..±23) = 0.86 vs 0.31 random; single-image leave-one-out phase-match +0.83 vs real photos -0.24. (Black 2.5-flash fills clip to std≈0 — SynthID can't push values below 0, so no carrier in black; the repo's dark carriers come from nano-banana-pro.) But it does not generalize: (a) carriers are model-version + resolution + color specific — the repo's v4 codebook (built for gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview + nano-banana-pro-preview) scores ~0.527 on my 2.5-flash white fills, indistinguishable from negatives (~0.50), i.e. carriers shift across model versions and need a per-model codebook; (b) on real content (30 2.5-flash images) the carrier collapses — set phase coherence at carriers 0.37 ≈ random 0.42, and the repo's v4 detector gives content 0.518 ≈ negatives 0.504 (no separation; a faint +0.24 single-image lean is likely a brightness confound). Net: the spectral/phase approach is a real controlled-fill characterizer, NOT an arbitrary-real-content detector, and is brittle to model version. Metadata proxy + visible sparkle + online oracles remain the ceiling for real content.
• External AI-vs-real classifier models are out of scope (decided 2026-05-24). Generic HuggingFace detectors (Organika/sdxl-detector Swin Transformer, umm-maybe/AI-image-detector, and fine-tunes) exist and report ~0.98 on their own SDXL-vs-real validation sets, but they are per-generator and the model cards themselves note degraded accuracy off-distribution; they are untested on gpt-image / Gemini Nano Banana (the metadata-stripped surfaces we care about), and our own light SDXL pass would likely defeat them the same way it defeats SynthID. Detection here stays local + signal-based (metadata + visible sparkle); do not add a bundled classifier dependency.
• SynthID v2 vs default pipeline: the SDXL-based default profile (since May 2026) defeats SynthID v2. Verified end-to-end (May 2026): local SDXL run on a Gemini 3 Pro output, checked via the Gemini app's "Verify with SynthID" feature, returned "no SynthID watermark detected". Also confirmed against OpenAI's SynthID (2026-05-23): a fresh ChatGPT/gpt-image output read "SynthID detected" on openai.com/verify before the local SDXL run and "SynthID not detected" after (corpus regression chain: pos 4ef377bd -> cleaned 47188e88). The same configuration is used in raiw-app production (fal-ai/fast-sdxl/image-to-image, strength 0.05, steps 50, guidance 7.5, no pre-downscale). fal's own llms.txt for fast-sdxl names the base checkpoint as stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0 (verified 2026-05-25) -- the exact checkpoint the local CLI defaults to (DEFAULT_MODEL_ID). So the local invisible default is weight-for-weight identical to prod; "fast-sdxl" is fal's optimized serving, not different weights. After the native-resolution fix the local pipeline matches prod on weights + strength + steps + guidance + resolution. SD-1.5 dreamshaper at 768 px was previously the default and does NOT defeat v2 — verified empirically against the same feature (strength 0.04, 0.10, and elastic warp α∈{5,8} all flagged positive). That SD-1.5 path was removed; only default (SDXL) and ctrlregen profiles remain. Scope of the claim: defeating the SynthID verifier is NOT the same as forensic invisibility. "Removing the Watermark Is Not Enough: Forensic Stealth in Generative-AI Watermark Removal" (arXiv:2605.09203, 2026-05) shows that six removal attacks across four families (UnMarker, CtrlRegen+, WatermarkAttacker, etc.) all leave forensic traces: independent detectors flag removal-processed images vs genuinely-clean ones at >98% TPR at 1% FPR. So our SDXL pass makes the oracle read "SynthID not detected," but the output can still be classifiable as "an image that went through a removal pipeline." Do not over-claim "indistinguishable from a real photo." https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09203