PWPH:Proactive Deepfake Detection Method Based on Watermarking and Perceptual Hashing

The popularity of Deepfake technology has raised the challenge of recognizing real and fake faces. While detection methods already exist, most of them are passive forensics and face challenges of generalizability and migration. Currently, some research attempts to protect the original image by priorly inserting invisible information. However, there are still shortcomings in terms of image quality and information robustness due to information embedding, i.e., watermarking. Therefore, we employ the robustness of perceptual hash coding and combine it with information hiding techniques to propose a proactive Deepfake detection solution, referred to as PWPH in this paper. Our approach is simple and efficient: first, the image containing a face is divided into two parts: FA (face area), and NFA (non-face area). A perceptual hash code is generated from the non-face area (NFA). Then, the hash codes are embedded as watermarks into the FA. At the extraction stage, we use the same method as the encoder to retrieve the embedded watermark from FA. The watermark is then compared with the hash code generated from the NFA of the detected image. The extracted watermark is sensitive to distortion and may vanish during Deepfake processing. Experimental results validate that our method, requiring just one encoder and decoder, enables active detection and source tracking. Furthermore, its efficacy in typical Deepfake scenarios such as face swapping and expression reconstruction is confirmed through comparison with prior arts.