Robust and Unstigmatized Imperceptible Perturbations for Rendering Face Manipulation Ineffective

The widespread adoption of face manipulation systems has brought entertainment and convenience to users while posing significant challenges to media forensics. Conventional active defense strategies typically generate adversarial images by introducing perturbations into the original images. When adversarial images undergo facial manipulation, they often exhibit distortions or speckle artifacts, which helps reduce the dissemination of forged content on social media platforms. Nevertheless, the widespread dissemination of degraded images may contribute to facial stigmatization. Furthermore, conventional perturbation techniques are vulnerable to failure under JPEG compression and various image processing operations on OSN platforms. To address these challenges, we introduce a robust and unstigmatized imperceptible perturbation (RUIP) method designed to counteract face manipulation. First, RUIP utilizes an end-to-end adversarial training framework to generate robust and imperceptible perturbations. Second, to mitigate facial stigmatization, we incorporate both pixel-level and feature-level guidance losses during training, ensuring that the output images remain visually natural and closely aligned with the original images. Finally, we develop a novel module, the Flexible Random Enhancement Generator (FREG), to simulate complex JPEG compression and diverse image processing operations on OSN platforms, enhancing the model’s robustness against perturbations. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method effectively defends against face manipulation attacks while preserving the visual quality of facial images under JPEG compression and other image processing operations on OSN platforms. We propose an effective and unstigmatized defense algorithm to safeguard privacy and maintain the stability of the social media ecosystem. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Code is available at</i> https://github.com/silencecmsj/RUIP.