Proactive Deepfake Defence via Identity Watermarking

Yuan Zhao, Bo Liu, Ming Ding, Baoping Liu, Tianqing Zhu, Xin Yu

Abstract: The explosive progress of Deepfake techniques poses unprecedented privacy and security risks to our society by creating real-looking but fake visual content. The current Deepfake detection studies are still in their infancy because they mainly rely on capturing artifacts left by a Deepfake synthesis process as detection clues, which can be easily removed by various distortions (e.g. blurring) or advanced Deepfake techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel method that does not depend on identifying the artifacts but resorts to the mechanism of anti-counterfeit labels to protect face images from malicious Deepfake tampering. Specifically, we design a neural network with an encoder-decoder structure to embed watermarks as anti-Deepfake labels into the facial identity features. The injected label is entangled with the facial identity feature, so it will be sensitive to face swap translations (i.e., Deepfake) and robust to conventional image modifications (e.g., resize and compress). Therefore, we can identify whether watermarked images have been tampered with by Deepfake methods according to the label’s existence. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve average detection accuracy of more than 80%, which validates the proposed method’s effectiveness in implementing Deepfake detection.