Existing audio watermarking methods usually treat the host audio signals of a function of time or frequency individually, while considering them in the joint time-frequency (TF) domain has received less attention. This paper proposes an audio watermarking framework from the perspective of TF analysis. The proposed framework treats the host audio signal in the 2-dimensional (2D) TF plane, and selects a series of patches within the 2D TF image. These patches correspond to the TF clusters with minimum averaged energy, and are used to form the feature vectors for watermark embedding. Classical spread spectrum embedding schemes are incorporated in the framework. The feature patches that carry the watermarks only occupy a few TF regions of the host audio signal, thus leading to improved imperceptibility property. In addition, since the feature patches contain a neighborhood area of TF representation of audio samples, the correlations among the samples within a single patch could be exploited for improved robustness against a series of processing attacks. Extensive experiments are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system, as compared to its counterpart systems. The aim of this work is to shed some light on the notion of audio watermarking in TF feature domain, which may potentially lead us to more robust watermarking solutions against malicious attacks.