Proactive Deepfake Detection via Self-Verifiable Semantic Watermarking

Malicious Deepfakes pose serious security risks by producing highly realistic forged faces. While numerous countermeasures have been developed to train binary Deepfake classifiers, their limited generalization capacity restricts practical deployment. To proactively defend against Deepfakes, we propose SVS-WM, a Self-Verifiable Semantic Watermarking strategy. The core idea behind SVS-WM is to embed pairs of correlated watermarks within facial semantics, leveraging the inherent fragility of these features, i.e., any semantic modification will disrupt the watermark correlation, thereby enabling robust Deepfake detection. SVS-WM employs a facial semantic disentanglement and reconstruction network, allowing semi-fragile watermarks to be embedded concurrently across multiple semantic levels, including identity and multi-levels of attributes. Specifically, pairs of pseudo-random noise watermarks are adaptively injected into facial attribute and identity features. During propagation stage, the protected image may encounter identity or facial attributes manipulations, we then detect Deepfakes by verifying the correlation result between the decoded attribute watermark and the extracted identity vector. This unique cross-verification mechanism enables authentication without requiring original reference watermark, thereby realizing blind Deepfake detection. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an average detection accuracy of 98.19% across diverse Deepfake manipulations.