Defending Deepfakes by Saliency-Aware Attack

With the rapid development of deep learning, especially the generative adversarial network (GAN), face modification has been substantially advanced and enables the generated images to look more realistic. Given an image or a video frame of a person, such a system can create fake images, which manipulates the movement, expression, and even appearance, e.g., hair color, eye color, and age. Such a system is termed Deepfake, which has raised significant ethical issues, especially for celebrities. With the pretrained Deepfake models being widely available on the Internet, its negative applications, such as face manipulation and pornographic generation, have exposed the dark side of the Deepfake technology to the sociocyber world. In this article, we aim to defend a well-trained Deepfake model by manipulating the raw image with unperceived perturbation. To minimize the alterations to the original image while effectively fooling the Deepfake model, we propose to selectively perturb only the foreground person region and maintain the irrelevant background. This is based on the observation that the salient object in a person’s image is always the foreground face region. Such a strategy introduces negligible alterations to the original image, which makes the attack remain effective. We experimentally demonstrate the superiority of the proposed attacking framework over the existing models and show our approach is ready to be applied for out-of-the-box development.