Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Evennou, Gautier, Chappelier, Vivien, Kijak, Ewa
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Evennou, Gautier
Chappelier, Vivien
Kijak, Ewa
author_facet Evennou, Gautier
Chappelier, Vivien
Kijak, Ewa
contents Most image watermarking systems focus on robustness, capacity, and imperceptibility while treating the embedded payload as meaningless bits. This bit-centric view imposes a hard ceiling on capacity and prevents watermarks from carrying useful information. We propose LatentSeal, which reframes watermarking as semantic communication: a lightweight text autoencoder maps full-sentence messages into a compact 256-dimensional unit-norm latent vector, which is robustly embedded by a finetuned watermark model and secured through a secret, invertible rotation. The resulting system hides full-sentence messages, decodes in real time, and survives valuemetric and geometric attacks. It surpasses prior state of the art in BLEU-4 and Exact Match on several benchmarks, while breaking through the long-standing 256-bit payload ceiling. It also introduces a statistically calibrated score that yields a ROC AUC score of 0.97-0.99, and practical operating points for deployment. By shifting from bit payloads to semantic latent vectors, LatentSeal enables watermarking that is not only robust and high-capacity, but also secure and interpretable, providing a concrete path toward provenance, tamper explanation, and trustworthy AI governance. Models, training and inference code, and data splits will be available upon publication.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00799
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors
Evennou, Gautier
Chappelier, Vivien
Kijak, Ewa
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Most image watermarking systems focus on robustness, capacity, and imperceptibility while treating the embedded payload as meaningless bits. This bit-centric view imposes a hard ceiling on capacity and prevents watermarks from carrying useful information. We propose LatentSeal, which reframes watermarking as semantic communication: a lightweight text autoencoder maps full-sentence messages into a compact 256-dimensional unit-norm latent vector, which is robustly embedded by a finetuned watermark model and secured through a secret, invertible rotation. The resulting system hides full-sentence messages, decodes in real time, and survives valuemetric and geometric attacks. It surpasses prior state of the art in BLEU-4 and Exact Match on several benchmarks, while breaking through the long-standing 256-bit payload ceiling. It also introduces a statistically calibrated score that yields a ROC AUC score of 0.97-0.99, and practical operating points for deployment. By shifting from bit payloads to semantic latent vectors, LatentSeal enables watermarking that is not only robust and high-capacity, but also secure and interpretable, providing a concrete path toward provenance, tamper explanation, and trustworthy AI governance. Models, training and inference code, and data splits will be available upon publication.
title Fast, Secure, and High-Capacity Image Watermarking with Autoencoded Text Vectors
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00799