Your Text Encoder Can Be an Object-Level Watermarking Controller

Invisible watermarking of AI-generated images can help with copyright protection, enabling detection and identification of AI-generated media. In this work, we present a novel approach to watermark images of T2I Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). By only fine-tuning text token embeddings W_*, we enable watermarking in selected objects or parts of the image, offering greater flexibility compared to traditional full-image watermarking. Our method leverages the text encoder's compatibility across various LDMs, allowing plug-and-play integration for different LDMs. Moreover, introducing the watermark early in the encoding stage improves robustness to adversarial perturbations in later stages of the pipeline. Our approach achieves 99% bit accuracy (48 bits) with a 10⁵ × reduction in model parameters, enabling efficient watermarking. Code can be found at github.com/naresh-ub/object_watermark.