# SSH-Net: A Self-Supervised and Hybrid Network for Noisy Image Watermark Removal

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05088/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [MetaFormer Is Actually What You Need for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11418/) (2021)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [Noise2Void - Learning Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10980/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [Learning A Sparse Transformer Network for Effective Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11950/) (2023)
- [DRD-Net: Detail-recovery Image Deraining via Context Aggregation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10267/) (2019)
- [Towards Photo-Realistic Visible Watermark Removal with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12845/) (2019)
- [Bitstream-Corrupted JPEG Images are Restorable: Two-stage Compensation and Alignment Framework for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06976/) (2023)
- [CRFormer: A Cross-Region Transformer for Shadow Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01600/) (2022)
- [ByteNet: Rethinking Multimedia File Fragment Classification through Visual Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20855/) (2024)
- [Perceptive self-supervised learning network for noisy image watermark removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02211/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visible watermark removal is challenging due to its inherent complexities and the noise carried within images. Existing methods primarily rely on supervised learning approaches that require paired datasets of watermarked and watermark-free images, which are often impractical to obtain in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose SSH-Net, a Self-Supervised and Hybrid Network specifically designed for noisy image watermark removal. SSH-Net synthesizes reference watermark-free images using the watermark distribution in a self-supervised manner and adopts a dual-network design to address the task. The upper network, focused on the simpler task of noise removal, employs a lightweight CNN-based architecture, while the lower network, designed to handle the more complex task of simultaneously removing watermarks and noise, incorporates Transformer blocks to model long-range dependencies and capture intricate image features. To enhance the model's effectiveness, a shared CNN-based feature encoder is introduced before dual networks to extract common features that both networks can leverage. Our code will be available at https://github.com/wenyang001/SSH-Net.