# Social Media Authentication and Combating Deepfakes using Semi-fragile Invisible Image Watermarking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01906/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Watermarking generated content and models, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 38 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Watermarking generated content and models](https://mlsanity.com/safety/watermarking-generated-content-and-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Obfuscated Gradients Give a False Sense of Security: Circumventing Defenses to Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00420/) (2018)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [Face X-ray for More General Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13458/) (2019)
- [HiDDeN: Hiding Data With Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09937/) (2018)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [Exposing DeepFake Videos By Detecting Face Warping Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00656/) (2018)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Everybody Dance Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07371/) (2018)
- [Lips Don't Lie: A Generalisable and Robust Approach to Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07657/) (2020)
- [StegaStamp: Invisible Hyperlinks in Physical Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05343/) (2019)
- [Deferred Neural Rendering: Image Synthesis using Neural Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12356/) (2019)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Deepfakes Creation and Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11573/) (2019)
- [Distortion Agnostic Deep Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04580/) (2020)
- [Generating Steganographic Images via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00371/) (2017)
- [Anti-Forgery: Towards a Stealthy and Robust DeepFake Disruption Attack via Adversarial Perceptual-aware Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00477/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Deep Data Hiding for ICAO-Compliant Face Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19324/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Visual Deepfake Detection: Can AI Predict and Prevent Fake Content Before It's Created?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18461/) (2025)
- [Unified Face Matching and Physical-Digital Spoofing Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09635/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Level Strategy for Deepfake Content Moderation under EU Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08879/) (2025)
- [SAiW: Source-Attributable Invisible Watermarking for Proactive Deepfake Defense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23178/) (2026)
- [A Valid Watermark Is Not a Valid Identity: Spatial-Spectral Adversarial Face Evasion with Watermark Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.20278/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the significant advances in deep generative models for image and video synthesis, Deepfakes and manipulated media have raised severe societal concerns. Conventional machine learning classifiers for deepfake detection often fail to cope with evolving deepfake generation technology and are susceptible to adversarial attacks. Alternatively, invisible image watermarking is being researched as a proactive defense technique that allows media authentication by verifying an invisible secret message embedded in the image pixels. A handful of invisible image watermarking techniques introduced for media authentication have proven vulnerable to basic image processing operations and watermark removal attacks. In response, we have proposed a semi-fragile image watermarking technique that embeds an invisible secret message into real images for media authentication. Our proposed watermarking framework is designed to be fragile to facial manipulations or tampering while being robust to benign image-processing operations and watermark removal attacks. This is facilitated through a unique architecture of our proposed technique consisting of critic and adversarial networks that enforce high image quality and resiliency to watermark removal efforts, respectively, along with the backbone encoder-decoder and the discriminator networks. Thorough experimental investigations on SOTA facial Deepfake datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can embed a 64-bit secret as an imperceptible image watermark that can be recovered with a high-bit recovery accuracy when benign image processing operations are applied while being non-recoverable when unseen Deepfake manipulations are applied. In addition, our proposed watermarking technique demonstrates high resilience to several white-box and black-box watermark removal attacks. Thus, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.