Title: Imperceptible Protection against Style Imitation from Diffusion Models

Abstract: Recent progress in diffusion models has profoundly enhanced the fidelity of image generation. However, this has raised concerns about copyright infringements. While prior methods have introduced adversarial perturbations to prevent style imitation, most are accompanied by the degradation of artworks' visual quality. Recognizing the importance of maintaining this, we develop a visually improved protection method that preserves its protection capability. To this end, we create a perceptual map to identify areas most sensitive to human eyes. We then adjust the protection intensity guided by an instance-aware refinement. We also integrate a perceptual constraints bank to further improve the imperceptibility. Results show that our method substantially elevates the quality of the protected image without compromising on protection efficacy.