Can Tainted Pixels Expose Deepfake Videos?
Organizations: National University of Singapore
Abstract
Publicly-acceesible face-manipulation tools have made deepfake creation accessible to non-expert users. Against these, existing defenses are mostly post-hoc, detecting only after forgery has occurred, and operating on still images rather than videos. Research is lacking in i) the proactive protection of published facial videos against black-box manipulation tools, and in (ii) understanding its perceptual effect on human viewers. We introduce TaintedPixels, a proactive video-protection method built around an asymmetric visibility trade-off: the embedded watermark should remain inconspicuous in the published video but become obvious once a downstream tool manipulates the video. TaintedPixels injects structured periodic perturbations into the blue channel of facial regions and refines them under stripe-visibility, color-cast, and video-level LPIPS budgets, with lightweight motion-adaptive deployment. We believe TaintedPixels is the first proactive defense designed specifically against black-box manipulation tools rather than image-level pipelines or specific surrogate generators. Across three publicly available off-the-shelf video manipulation tools and two off-the-shelf detectors, TaintedPixels attains the highest forgery fake rate while keeping perturbations small (LPIPS = 0.0042). Our non-expert human study, conducted on a diverse set of 300 video stimuli spanning different lighting conditions, backgrounds, and skin tones, shows that protected source videos draw a 3.26% suspicion rate, while forgeries from protected sources are identified as fake much more often than forgeries from unprotected sources (90.72% vs. 56.71%). This validates the effectiveness of TaintedPixels.
Figures & tables
| Tool | Detector | Metric | Clean | DFRAP | CMUA | FacePoison | FaceShield | TaintedPixels (ours) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roop | D1 Fake | Fake Rate | 78.33 | 79.63 | 78.64 | 80.33 | 84.32 | 89.12 |
| Fake Conf. | 75.67 | 78.72 | 76.87 | 73.95 | 80.32 | 86.58 | ||
| D2 Fake | Fake Rate | 82.43 | 84.51 | 83.02 | 83.93 | 86.71 | 90.27 | |
| Fake Conf. | 72.10 | 75.39 | 74.95 | 80.63 | 81.66 | 86.92 | ||
| FaceFusion | D1 Fake | Fake Rate | 80.87 | 80.39 | 82.01 | 82.20 | 84.02 | 88.71 |
| Fake Conf. | 73.43 | 76.74 | 75.43 | 74.93 | 79.34 | 89.14 |
| Periodic Prior | HF Mask | Face-aware | Visibility Budget | Motion Scaling | Video LPIPS | Avg. Fake Rate | Video-LPIPS |
| – | – | – | – | – | – | 81.49 | – |
| ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | 86.10 | 0.1094 |
| ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | 87.17 | 0.2036 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | 87.84 | 0.1895 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | 88.35 | 0.0164 |
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | 89.62 | 0.0103 |
| Clean Source | Protected Source | Tool | Forged from Clean | Forged from Protected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.80 | 3.26 | Roop | 54.23 | 89.42 |
| FaceFusion | 51.80 | 94.51 | ||
| MuseTalk | 64.11 | 88.24 | ||
| Average | 56.71 | 90.72 |
Appendix figures & tables2 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Symbol / Term | Value / Definition | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Amplitude of the structured blue-channel prior. | ||
| Fraction of high-frequency patches selected. | ||
| Period of the local periodic pattern. | ||
| Perturbation magnitude bound. | ||
| Weight for . | ||
| Weight for . |
| Term | Role |
|---|---|
| Blue-difference chroma channel used to measure blue-channel color changes. | |
| Content-adaptive stripe visibility budget estimated from clean-frame chroma statistics. | |
| Combined soft white/skin-region mask for color-cast suppression. | |
| Content-adaptive color-cast budget estimated from clean-frame white/skin chroma statistics. | |
| Measures row-wise coherent chroma drift, corresponding to visible stripe/banding artifacts. | |
| Measures local weighted blue-chroma deviation. |
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