Image Watermarking with Memory across Reissuance

Publishers often revise and reissue images, yet valid watermarks may persist on superseded releases or unapproved edits. Even a current release can contain regions last authorized at different revisions. We introduce and formalize reissuable provenance: determining an image's current, superseded, or unissued status and recovering each region's last authorized revision (its generation), with abstention when evidence is insufficient. Generational Stratigraphy Fields (GSF) combine watermark evidence with an authenticated live reference to the current release, enabling replacement or retirement without rewriting circulated copies. Each reissue freshly embeds new generation labels in approved regions and inherited labels elsewhere, preserving history without requiring old watermarks to survive successive edits. Our complete-output reissuance evaluation follows 480 histories through four releases, retaining each AI editor's entire output. GSF achieves 99.67% accuracy in classifying issued images as current or superseded and 94.09% recall of unissued edits. After three reissues, one generation map provides time and location: it recovers regional labels with 93.13% median accuracy and localizes the latest approved revision with 92.86% IoU. Regional labels remain readable under tested delivery transformations that impair issued-state recognition. Watermarks can thus express who issued an image, which release is authoritative now, and when each region was last authorized.