Video Watermark Removal

This repository contains code to help remove watermarks from videos. For Shutterstock videos, it's ready-to-go out of the box - good for datasets such as WebVid.

It's very fast, and runs on CPU. It doesn't use any machine learning. It's not perfect, but generally does a very good job. It assumes the watermarks are transparent and uses template matching to find the watermarks then inverse alpha-blending to remove them. Unlike other watermark removal methods, this does not use inpainting - letting it retain more information than many other available implementations out there.

Getting Started

Simple Usage

You can simply git clone this repo, then use the files in it.

1. Use the make_watermark_exr.py file to extract the watermark.exr file - which is the watermark overlay. If you're trying to remove watermarks from Shutterstock videos (aka WebVid), you can skip this step as we've already included a watermark.exr file in this repo.

2. Import remove_watermark.py and use the remove_watermark(video) function to remove watermarks from a video. See its docstring for more information.

3. If you want to get started right away, import remove_watermark.py and run remove_watermark.demo_remove_watermark()

Installation

You can also install this package via pip.

Simply run

git clone https://github.com/RyannDaGreat/remove_watermark.git $(python -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages()[0])")/remove_watermark

You may also need to run brew install ffmpeg or sudo apt install ffmpeg

I haven't included a requirements.txt file yet, but the only special library you'll need is called "rp" - which can be installed via pip install rp or the above command. When running this code, other needed packages will be installed on the fly as you need them.

Usage

 >>> from remove_watermark import remove_watermark
 >>> import rp
 >>> video = rp.load_video('webvid/stock-footage-centennial-olympic-park-in-downtown-atlanta-georgia-water-fountains.mp4')
 >>> video_without_watermark = remove_watermark(video)
 >>> rp.save_video_mp4(video_without_watermark, 'output.mp4')

Extracting the Watermark

The make_watermark_exr.py uses special video clips where the background is easy to predict. Here are some video URLs you can use to crack the watermark:

• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-10884623-4k-pastel-pixel-animation-background-seamless-loop
• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-16241737-4k-red-blue-yellow-pixel-animation-background
• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1070206990-abstract-art-glow-graphics-bright-colors
• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1099841851-color-background-animations-video-4-k-liquid
• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1052744771-abstract-8-bit-retro-computer-game-loading-screen
• https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1064430046-green-screen-moving-colorful-frame

These files are also found in the watermark_extraction/ folder. See make_watermark_exr.py for how that folder is used.

Example Outputs

Below are two examples of the watermark removal results. The top half is with the watermark removed, and the bottom half is the original.