Overview
Algorithm type: invisible watermark. Media types: image, video. Deployment: the Reconize Mac app, a C2PA-conformant Generator Product (Max Assurance Level 1), running entirely on-device on Apple silicon.
The underlying watermarking model is VideoSeal, Meta AI's open research (MIT licensed), converted to Core ML by Reconize. A 256-bit identity payload is embedded imperceptibly into the pixels of images and video frames at signing time, engineered to survive compression, scaling, and re-encoding.
Use as a C2PA soft binding
When Reconize signs an asset, it embeds the watermark and records the same identifier in the asset's C2PA Manifest as a c2pa.soft-binding assertion using the soft-binding-map structure:
{
"alg": "me.reconize.videoseal.1",
"blocks": [
{ "scope": {}, "value": "<watermark id, hex>" }
]
}The empty scope denotes the whole asset. The value is the hex form of the payload embedded in the pixels, so a validator that extracts the watermark can match it against the manifest's claim, and a manifest can be re-associated with an asset whose metadata was removed in transit.
Embedding
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Payload | 256-bit identity payload, unique per signing operation |
| Images | Single-pass embed (JPEG, PNG, HEIC) |
| Video | Per-frame embed (H.264, HEVC, ProRes), configurable frame coverage |
| Compute | Core ML on Apple silicon (CPU/GPU/ANE), fully on-device |
| Self-check | Every embed is read back from the output before the manifest asserts it; low-texture content that cannot hold the mark is signed at container level instead, with no soft-binding claim |
Extraction & matching
Extraction runs the VideoSeal detector on-device. For video, evidence is aggregated across sampled frames; matching against a manifest's claimed identifier uses a Hamming-distance tolerance rather than requiring an exact bit-perfect read, so ordinary distribution transforms do not break re-identification.
Resolution is currently local: Reconize matches extracted identifiers against manifests present in the asset or recorded in the signer's on-device history. No public Soft Binding Resolution API is operated at this time; softBindingResolutionApis is intentionally omitted from the registry entry.
Scope notes
Reconize also embeds an inaudible AudioSeal mark in soundtracks and standalone audio, carrying a checksum tied to the same signing operation. Because that payload corroborates but cannot independently recover a manifest identifier, it is deliberately not part of this registration.
Contact
Maintained by Lil Dog Productions, LLC (Reconize). Questions about this algorithm or the registry entry: hello@reconize.me.