Where Watermark Meets Beauty: Expert-Guided Aesthetic Visible Watermarking for Digital Artworks

In the era of widespread digital art dissemination, visible watermarks provide immediate copyright identification by overlaying visible markers, addressing the lag issue of invisible watermarks that are difficult to prevent in advance due to post hoc evidence collection, thus meeting artists' needs for preemptive prevention and explicit protection. However, existing approaches struggle to balance aesthetics and functionality. To address this challenge, we conducted an exploratory study with watermarking experts, identifying key principles, six common design patterns, and a systematic watermarking workflow. Based on these insights, we developed an end-to-end, perceptual-aware framework for aesthetic-preserving watermark embedding, modeled after expert workflows in 5 phases. Using the Chain-of-Thought strategy, we optimized prompt instructions to guide the Vision-Language Model in emulating experts' decision-making, generating effective watermarking schemes and conducting objective visual evaluations. Iterative feedback optimization ensures watermarked images adhere to aesthetic principles. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the system's superiority over baseline methods in preserving aesthetics and ensuring effective copyright protection.