I haven't found a tool that implements the techniques described in this Google paper from 8 years ago: https://watermark-cvpr17.github.io/
Upscaling old purchased images feels like a more common need.
- Incorrectly identifies areas for inpainting. You can see this with the figure, a lot of detail, not obscured by the watermark, is erased and then redrawn. This leads to a totally distorted look. The belt just disappears into nothing, the cloth just becomes a gradient, where a crisp line used to be.
- Low quality inpainting. Even the inpainting is done terribly. This looks like something done with some very simple diffusion based inpainting. Absolutely not state of the art.
How is this technical impressive? It fails at segmentation and it fails at inpainting.
I presume for a commercial product you would but a successful result front and center.
Now they replaced it with an image where the inpainting just needs to fill in a gradient. Which is of course trivial.
Why do you not make your product better instead? Obviously the first one was what the customer should expect from your product. Also look at the top left tree! The segmentation still fails to correctly identify the watermark.
