# LatentSeal
Fast, secure & high‑capacity **semantic image watermarking** with text‑autoencoded messages.
> Hide full sentences in images, survive heavy JPEG/crop/noise, decode in real time.
## Installation
```bash
pip install latseal # use `pip install -e .` when developing locally
```
The first call to `latseal.embed(...)` or `latseal.encode(...)` will download
the required TorchScript models and autoencoder checkpoint into
`~/.cache/latseal` (override with `LATSEAL_CACHE_DIR`). The download is ~1.5 GB
and only happens once per machine. Set `LATSEAL_LOCAL_ONLY=1` to disable
network access and rely on locally provided weights via the `LATSEAL_*`
environment overrides documented in `latseal._resources`. By default the assets
are pulled from the Hugging Face repository [`Gevennou/lseal`](https://huggingface.co/Gevennou/lseal).
Watermarking and autoencoding can be used independently or chained, depending
on your workflow.
## Quickstart Demo
Watermarking and text autoencoding de…
