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.
Shruti Agarwal, Vishal Asnani, John Collomossecs.CV
We present a method for training imperceptible visual watermarks to coexist with other such watermarks. Recent work has shown that independently trained image watermarking models can coexist with surprisingly limited interference, enabling watermark ensembling. However, this coexistence is a serendipitous property rather than an explicit optimization objective, leaving interference uncontrolled and potentially reducing decoding robustness or visual quality. We first show empirically that the same coexistence property extends to video watermarking. We then show that both image and video watermarks can be trained with a decoder-aware objective to improve coexistence. Our results suggest a practical path to signpost watermarks that indicate the presence of independently deployed provenance watermarking systems, supporting layered provenance signaling for content authenticity and rights.
Vishal Asnani, Shruti Agarwal, John Collomossecs.CV
We present FlowMark, a video watermarking framework guided by automatically predicted object masks. In contrast to prior region-based approaches that require user-supplied mask guidance, FlowMark learns to identify optimal regions for watermark embedding through a dedicated Mask Predictor network. Our end-to-end trainable architecture combines region-aware encoding with noise-augmented training to ensure robustness against compression, geometric transformations, and content variation, while preserving high perceptual quality. Our content-adaptive masking keeps watermark signals coherent with natural video dynamics, effectively eliminating perceptual flicker. Beyond compression robustness, FlowMark maintains reliable watermark recovery under video-native temporal edits (e.g., frame swap, insertion, deletion, resampling, and interpolation) and real-world social media distribution pipelines (e.g., YouTube and Facebook re-encoding). Experimental results on both image and video datasets show that FlowMark reliably embeds $128$-bit messages with up to $50.08$ dB PSNR, offering strong performance for content provenance, temporal authenticity verification, and video integrity protection.