FlowMark: Mask-Guided Video Watermarking

Abstract: We present FlowMark, a video watermarking framework guided by automatically predicted object masks. In contrast to prior region-based approaches that require user-supplied mask guidance, FlowMark learns to identify optimal regions for watermark embedding through a dedicated Mask Predictor network. Our end-to-end trainable architecture combines region-aware encoding with noise-augmented training to ensure robustness against compression, geometric transformations, and content variation, while preserving high perceptual quality. Our content-adaptive masking keeps watermark signals coherent with natural video dynamics, effectively eliminating perceptual flicker. Beyond compression robustness, FlowMark maintains reliable watermark recovery under video-native temporal edits (e.g., frame swap, insertion, deletion, resampling, and interpolation) and real-world social media distribution pipelines (e.g., YouTube and Facebook re-encoding). Experimental results on both image and video datasets show that FlowMark reliably embeds $128$-bit messages with up to $50.08$ dB PSNR, offering strong performance for content provenance, temporal authenticity verification, and video integrity protection.