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Face manipulation detection has been receiving a lot of attention for the reliability and security of the face images/videos. Recent studies focus on using auxiliary information or prior knowledge to capture robust manipulation traces, which are shown to be promising. As one of the important face features, the face depth map, which has shown to be effective in other areas such as face recognition or face detection, is unfortunately paid little attention to in literature for face manipulation detection. In this paper, we explore the possibility of incorporating the face depth map as auxiliary information for robust face manipulation detection. To this end, we first propose a Face Depth Map Transformer (FDMT) to estimate the face depth map patch by patch from an RGB face image, which is able to capture the local depth anomaly created due to manipulation. The estimated face depth map is then considered as auxiliary information to be integrated with the backbone features using a Multi-head Depth Attention (MDA) mechanism that is newly designed. We also propose an RGB-Depth Inconsistency Attention (RDIA) module to effectively capture the inter-frame inconsistency for multi-frame input. Various experiments demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for face manipulation detection., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2212.14230

Digital watermarking has demonstrated its effectiveness in protecting multimedia content. However, existing watermarking are predominantly tailored for specific media types, rendering them less effective for the protection of content displayed on computer screens, which is often multimodal and dynamic. Visual Screen Content (VSC), is particularly susceptible to theft and leakage via screenshots, a vulnerability that current watermarking methods fail to adequately address. To tackle these challenges, we propose ScreenMark, a robust and practical watermarking method designed specifically for arbitrary VSC protection. ScreenMark utilizes a three-stage progressive watermarking framework. Initially, inspired by diffusion principles, we initialize the mutual transformation between regular watermark information and irregular watermark patterns. Subsequently, these patterns are integrated with screen content using a pre-multiplication alpha blending technique, supported by a pre-trained screen decoder for accurate watermark retrieval. The progressively complex distorter enhances the robustness of the watermark in real-world screenshot scenarios. Finally, the model undergoes fine-tuning guided by a joint-level distorter to ensure optimal performance. To validate the effectiveness of ScreenMark, we compiled a dataset comprising 100,000 screenshots from various devices and resolutions. Extensive experiments across different datasets confirm the method's superior robustness, imperceptibility, and practical applicability.

Convolution is the core component within deep neural networks and it is computationally intensive and time consuming. Tensor data layouts significantly impact convolution operations in terms of memory access and computational efficiency. Yet, there is still a lack of comprehensive performance characterization on data layouts on SIMD architectures concerning convolution methods. This paper proposes three novel data layouts for im2win convolution: NHWC, CHWN, and CHWN8, and introduces a set of general optimization techniques for both direct and im2win convolutions. We compare the optimized im2win convolution with the direct convolution and PyTorch's im2col-based convolution across the aforementioned layouts on SIMD machines. The experiments demonstrated that the im2win convolution with the new NHWC layout achieved up to 355% performance speedup over NCHW layout. Our optimizations also significantly improve the performance of both im2win and direct convolutions. Our optimized im2win and direct convolutions achieved up to 95% and 94% of machine's theoretical peak performance, respectively.

Deep models are being applied in numerous fields and have become a new important digital product. Meanwhile, previous studies have shown that deep models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, in which compromised models return attacker-desired results when a trigger appears. Backdoor attacks severely break the trust-worthiness of deep models. In this paper, we turn this weakness of deep models into a strength, and propose a novel revocable backdoor and deep model trading scenario. Specifically, we aim to compromise deep models without degrading their performance, meanwhile, we can easily detoxify poisoned models without re-training the models. We design specific mask matrices to manage the internal feature maps of the models. These mask matrices can be used to deactivate the backdoors. The revocable backdoor can be adopted in the deep model trading scenario. Sellers train models with revocable backdoors as a trial version. Buyers pay a deposit to sellers and obtain a trial version of the deep model. If buyers are satisfied with the trial version, they pay a final payment to sellers and sellers send mask matrices to buyers to withdraw revocable backdoors. We demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of our revocable backdoor by various datasets and network architectures., Comment: to appear in ECAI 2024

Recently, a vast number of image generation models have been proposed, which raises concerns regarding the misuse of these artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for generating fake images. To attribute the AI-generated images, existing schemes usually design and train deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn the model fingerprints, which usually requires a large amount of data for effective learning. In this paper, we aim to answer the following two questions for AI-generated image attribution, 1) is it possible to design useful handcrafted filters to facilitate the fingerprint learning? and 2) how we could reduce the amount of training data after we incorporate the handcrafted filters? We first propose a set of Multi-Directional High-Pass Filters (MHFs) which are capable to extract the subtle fingerprints from various directions. Then, we propose a Directional Enhanced Feature Learning network (DEFL) to take both the MHFs and randomly-initialized filters into consideration. The output of the DEFL is fused with the semantic features to produce a compact fingerprint. To make the compact fingerprint discriminative among different models, we propose a Dual-Margin Contrastive (DMC) loss to tune our DEFL. Finally, we propose a reference based fingerprint classification scheme for image attribution. Experimental results demonstrate that it is indeed helpful to use our MHFs for attributing the AI-generated images. The performance of our proposed method is significantly better than the state-of-the-art for both the closed-set and open-set image attribution, where only a small amount of images are required for training., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Image steganography is the process of hiding secret data in a cover image by subtle perturbation. Recent studies show that it is feasible to use a fixed neural network for data embedding and extraction. Such Fixed Neural Network Steganography (FNNS) demonstrates favorable performance without the need for training networks, making it more practical for real-world applications. However, the stego-images generated by the existing FNNS methods exhibit high distortion, which is prone to be detected by steganalysis tools. To deal with this issue, we propose a Cover-separable Fixed Neural Network Steganography, namely Cs-FNNS. In Cs-FNNS, we propose a Steganographic Perturbation Search (SPS) algorithm to directly encode the secret data into an imperceptible perturbation, which is combined with an AI-generated cover image for transmission. Through accessing the same deep generative models, the receiver could reproduce the cover image using a pre-agreed key, to separate the perturbation in the stego-image for data decoding. such an encoding/decoding strategy focuses on the secret data and eliminates the disturbance of the cover images, hence achieving a better performance. We apply our Cs-FNNS to the steganographic field that hiding secret images within cover images. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of visual quality and undetectability. Moreover, we show the flexibility of our Cs-FNNS in terms of hiding multiple secret images for different receivers., Comment: Accepetd at ACMMM 2024

Pioneer researches recognize evidences as crucial elements in fake news detection apart from patterns. Existing evidence-aware methods either require laborious pre-processing procedures to assure relevant and high-quality evidence data, or incorporate the entire spectrum of available evidences in all news cases, regardless of the quality and quantity of the retrieved data. In this paper, we propose an approach named \textbf{SEE} that retrieves useful information from web-searched annotation-free evidences with an early-termination mechanism. The proposed SEE is constructed by three main phases: \textbf{S}earching online materials using the news as a query and directly using their titles as evidences without any annotating or filtering procedure, sequentially \textbf{E}xamining the news alongside with each piece of evidence via attention mechanisms to produce new hidden states with retrieved information, and allowing \textbf{E}arly-termination within the examining loop by assessing whether there is adequate confidence for producing a correct prediction. We have conducted extensive experiments on datasets with unprocessed evidences, i.e., Weibo21, GossipCop, and pre-processed evidences, namely Snopes and PolitiFact. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches., Comment: ECAI 2024 paper. Fudan University & NVIDIA. To appear

Recent years have witnessed the prosperous development of Graph Self-supervised Learning (GSSL), which enables to pre-train transferable foundation graph encoders. However, the easy-to-plug-in nature of such encoders makes them vulnerable to copyright infringement. To address this issue, we develop a novel watermarking framework to protect graph encoders in GSSL settings. The key idea is to force the encoder to map a set of specially crafted trigger instances into a unique compact cluster in the outputted embedding space during model pre-training. Consequently, when the encoder is stolen and concatenated with any downstream classifiers, the resulting model inherits the `backdoor' of the encoder and predicts the trigger instances to be in a single category with high probability regardless of the ground truth. Experimental results have shown that, the embedded watermark can be transferred to various downstream tasks in black-box settings, including node classification, link prediction and community detection, which forms a reliable watermark verification system for GSSL in reality. This approach also shows satisfactory performance in terms of model fidelity, reliability and robustness., Comment: This is the latest version (see highlighted content, slight different from the final version submitted to IEEE Xplore)

Generation models have shown promising performance in various tasks, making trading around machine learning models possible. In this paper, we aim at a novel prompt trading scenario, prompt bundle trading (PBT) system, and propose an online pricing mechanism. Based on the combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) and three-stage hierarchical Stackelburg (HS) game, our pricing mechanism considers the profits of the consumer, platform, and seller, simultaneously achieving the profit satisfaction of these three participants. We break down the pricing issue into two steps, namely unknown category selection and incentive strategy optimization. The former step is to select a set of categories with the highest qualities, and the latter is to derive the optimal strategy for each participant based on the chosen categories. Unlike the existing fixed pricing mode, the PBT pricing mechanism we propose is more flexible and diverse, which is more in accord with the transaction needs of real-world scenarios. We test our method on a simulated text-to-image dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm, which provides a feasible price-setting standard for the prompt marketplaces.

Text-to-image generative models have recently garnered significant attention due to their ability to generate images based on prompt descriptions. While these models have shown promising performance, concerns have been raised regarding the potential misuse of the generated fake images. In response to this, we have presented a simple yet effective training-free method to attribute fake images generated by text-to-image models to their source models. Given a test image to be attributed, we first inverse the textual prompt of the image, and then put the reconstructed prompt into different candidate models to regenerate candidate fake images. By calculating and ranking the similarity of the test image and the candidate images, we can determine the source of the image. This attribution allows model owners to be held accountable for any misuse of their models. Note that our approach does not limit the number of candidate text-to-image generative models. Comprehensive experiments reveal that (1) Our method can effectively attribute fake images to their source models, achieving comparable attribution performance with the state-of-the-art method; (2) Our method has high scalability ability, which is well adapted to real-world attribution scenarios. (3) The proposed method yields satisfactory robustness to common attacks, such as Gaussian blurring, JPEG compression, and Resizing. We also analyze the factors that influence the attribution performance, and explore the boost brought by the proposed method as a plug-in to improve the performance of existing SOTA. We hope our work can shed some light on the solutions to addressing the source of AI-generated images, as well as to prevent the misuse of text-to-image generative models.

Steganography is the art of hiding secret data into the cover media for covert communication. In recent years, more and more deep neural network (DNN)-based steganographic schemes are proposed to train steganographic networks for secret embedding and recovery, which are shown to be promising. Compared with the handcrafted steganographic tools, steganographic networks tend to be large in size. It raises concerns on how to imperceptibly and effectively transmit these networks to the sender and receiver to facilitate the covert communication. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a Purified and Unified Steganographic Network (PUSNet). It performs an ordinary machine learning task in a purified network, which could be triggered into steganographic networks for secret embedding or recovery using different keys. We formulate the construction of the PUSNet into a sparse weight filling problem to flexibly switch between the purified and steganographic networks. We further instantiate our PUSNet as an image denoising network with two steganographic networks concealed for secret image embedding and recovery. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our PUSNet achieves good performance on secret image embedding, secret image recovery, and image denoising in a single architecture. It is also shown to be capable of imperceptibly carrying the steganographic networks in a purified network. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/albblgb/PUSNet}, Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, Accepted at CVPR2024

Backdoor attack against image classification task has been widely studied and proven to be successful, while there exist little research on the backdoor attack against vision-language models. In this paper, we explore backdoor attack towards image captioning models by poisoning training data. Assuming the attacker has total access to the training dataset, and cannot intervene in model construction or training process. Specifically, a portion of benign training samples is randomly selected to be poisoned. Afterwards, considering that the captions are usually unfolded around objects in an image, we design an object-oriented method to craft poisons, which aims to modify pixel values by a slight range with the modification number proportional to the scale of the current detected object region. After training with the poisoned data, the attacked model behaves normally on benign images, but for poisoned images, the model will generate some sentences irrelevant to the given image. The attack controls the model behavior on specific test images without sacrificing the generation performance on benign test images. Our method proves the weakness of image captioning models to backdoor attack and we hope this work can raise the awareness of defending against backdoor attack in the image captioning field.

Deceptive images can be shared in seconds with social networking services, posing substantial risks. Tampering traces, such as boundary artifacts and high-frequency information, have been significantly emphasized by massive networks in the Image Manipulation Localization (IML) field. However, they are prone to image post-processing operations, which limit the generalization and robustness of existing methods. We present a novel Prompt-IML framework. We observe that humans tend to discern the authenticity of an image based on both semantic and high-frequency information, inspired by which, the proposed framework leverages rich semantic knowledge from pre-trained visual foundation models to assist IML. We are the first to design a framework that utilizes visual foundation models specially for the IML task. Moreover, we design a Feature Alignment and Fusion module to align and fuse features of semantic features with high-frequency features, which aims at locating tampered regions from multiple perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve better performance on eight typical fake image datasets and outstanding robustness., Comment: Under Review

Traditional video steganography methods are based on modifying the covert space for embedding, whereas we propose an innovative approach that embeds secret message within semantic feature for steganography during the video editing process. Although existing traditional video steganography methods display a certain level of security and embedding capacity, they lack adequate robustness against common distortions in online social networks (OSNs). In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end robust generative video steganography network (RoGVS), which achieves visual editing by modifying semantic feature of videos to embed secret message. We employ face-swapping scenario to showcase the visual editing effects. We first design a secret message embedding module to adaptively hide secret message into the semantic feature of videos. Extensive experiments display that the proposed RoGVS method applied to facial video datasets demonstrate its superiority over existing video and image steganography techniques in terms of both robustness and capacity., Comment: Under Review

Training a deep neural network (DNN) requires a high computational cost. Buying models from sellers with a large number of computing resources has become prevailing. However, the buyer-seller environment is not always trusted. To protect the neural network models from leaking in an untrusted environment, we propose a novel copyright protection scheme for DNN using an input-sensitive neural network (ISNN). The main idea of ISNN is to make a DNN sensitive to the key and copyright information. Therefore, only the buyer with a correct key can utilize the ISNN. During the training phase, we add a specific perturbation to the clean images and mark them as legal inputs, while the other inputs are treated as illegal input. We design a loss function to make the outputs of legal inputs close to the true ones, while the illegal inputs are far away from true results. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is effective, valid, and secure.

The advancement in text-to-image models has led to astonishing artistic performances. However, several studios and websites illegally fine-tune these models using artists' artworks to mimic their styles for profit, which violates the copyrights of artists and diminishes their motivation to produce original works. Currently, there is a notable lack of research focusing on this issue. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking framework that detects mimicry in text-to-image models through fine-tuning. This framework embeds subtle watermarks into digital artworks to protect their copyrights while still preserving the artist's visual expression. If someone takes watermarked artworks as training data to mimic an artist's style, these watermarks can serve as detectable indicators. By analyzing the distribution of these watermarks in a series of generated images, acts of fine-tuning mimicry using stolen victim data will be exposed. In various fine-tune scenarios and against watermark attack methods, our research confirms that analyzing the distribution of watermarks in artificially generated images reliably detects unauthorized mimicry., Comment: A Watermarking Framework for Detecting Art Theft Mimicry in Text-to-Image Models

Recent generative models show impressive performance in generating photographic images. Humans can hardly distinguish such incredibly realistic-looking AI-generated images from real ones. AI-generated images may lead to ubiquitous disinformation dissemination. Therefore, it is of utmost urgency to develop a detector to identify AI generated images. Most existing detectors suffer from sharp performance drops over unseen generative models. In this paper, we propose a novel AI-generated image detector capable of identifying fake images created by a wide range of generative models. We observe that the texture patches of images tend to reveal more traces left by generative models compared to the global semantic information of the images. A novel Smash&Reconstruction preprocessing is proposed to erase the global semantic information and enhance texture patches. Furthermore, pixels in rich texture regions exhibit more significant fluctuations than those in poor texture regions. Synthesizing realistic rich texture regions proves to be more challenging for existing generative models. Based on this principle, we leverage the inter-pixel correlation contrast between rich and poor texture regions within an image to further boost the detection performance. In addition, we build a comprehensive AI-generated image detection benchmark, which includes 17 kinds of prevalent generative models, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing baselines and our approach. Our benchmark provides a leaderboard for follow-up studies. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Our project: https://fdmas.github.io/AIGCDetect, Comment: Our project: https://fdmas.github.io/AIGCDetect/

In this work, we propose StegGuard, a novel fingerprinting mechanism to verify the ownership of the suspect pre-trained encoder using steganography. A critical perspective in StegGuard is that the unique characteristic of the transformation from an image to an embedding, conducted by the pre-trained encoder, can be equivalently exposed how an embeder embeds secrets into images and how an extractor extracts the secrets from encoder's embeddings with a tolerable error after the secrets are subjected to the encoder's transformation. While each independent encoder has a distinct transformation, the piracy encoder has a similar transformation to the victim. Based on these, we learn a pair of secrets embeder and extractor as the fingerprint for the victim encoder. We introduce a frequency-domain channel attention embedding block into the embeder to adaptively embed secrets into suitable frequency bands. During verification, if the secrets embedded into the query images can be extracted with an acceptable error from the suspect encoder's embeddings, the suspect encoder is determined as piracy, otherwise independent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that depending on a very limited number of query images, StegGuard can reliably identify across varied independent encoders, and is robust against model stealing related attacks including model extraction, fine-tuning, pruning, embedding noising and shuffle.

Image steganography is the art of concealing secret information in images in a way that is imperceptible to unauthorized parties. Recent advances show that is possible to use a fixed neural network (FNN) for secret embedding and extraction. Such fixed neural network steganography (FNNS) achieves high steganographic performance without training the networks, which could be more useful in real-world applications. However, the existing FNNS schemes are vulnerable in the sense that anyone can extract the secret from the stego-image. To deal with this issue, we propose a key-based FNNS scheme to improve the security of the FNNS, where we generate key-controlled perturbations from the FNN for data embedding. As such, only the receiver who possesses the key is able to correctly extract the secret from the stego-image using the FNN. In order to improve the visual quality and undetectability of the stego-image, we further propose an adaptive perturbation optimization strategy by taking the perturbation cost into account. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme is capable of preventing unauthorized secret extraction from the stego-images. Furthermore, our scheme is able to generate stego-images with higher visual quality than the state-of-the-art FNNS scheme, especially when the FNN is a neural network for ordinary learning tasks.

Existing methods for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images (ORSI-SOD) mainly adopt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as the backbone, such as VGG and ResNet. Since CNNs can only extract features within certain receptive fields, most ORSI-SOD methods generally follow the local-to-contextual paradigm. In this paper, we propose a novel Global Extraction Local Exploration Network (GeleNet) for ORSI-SOD following the global-to-local paradigm. Specifically, GeleNet first adopts a transformer backbone to generate four-level feature embeddings with global long-range dependencies. Then, GeleNet employs a Direction-aware Shuffle Weighted Spatial Attention Module (D-SWSAM) and its simplified version (SWSAM) to enhance local interactions, and a Knowledge Transfer Module (KTM) to further enhance cross-level contextual interactions. D-SWSAM comprehensively perceives the orientation information in the lowest-level features through directional convolutions to adapt to various orientations of salient objects in ORSIs, and effectively enhances the details of salient objects with an improved attention mechanism. SWSAM discards the direction-aware part of D-SWSAM to focus on localizing salient objects in the highest-level features. KTM models the contextual correlation knowledge of two middle-level features of different scales based on the self-attention mechanism, and transfers the knowledge to the raw features to generate more discriminative features. Finally, a saliency predictor is used to generate the saliency map based on the outputs of the above three modules. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GeleNet outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/GeleNet., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2023

Backdoor attack aims to compromise a model, which returns an adversary-wanted output when a specific trigger pattern appears yet behaves normally for clean inputs. Current backdoor attacks require changing pixels of clean images, which results in poor stealthiness of attacks and increases the difficulty of the physical implementation. This paper proposes a novel physical invisible backdoor based on camera imaging without changing nature image pixels. Specifically, a compromised model returns a target label for images taken by a particular camera, while it returns correct results for other images. To implement and evaluate the proposed backdoor, we take shots of different objects from multi-angles using multiple smartphones to build a new dataset of 21,500 images. Conventional backdoor attacks work ineffectively with some classical models, such as ResNet18, over the above-mentioned dataset. Therefore, we propose a three-step training strategy to mount the backdoor attack. First, we design and train a camera identification model with the phone IDs to extract the camera fingerprint feature. Subsequently, we elaborate a special network architecture, which is easily compromised by our backdoor attack, by leveraging the attributes of the CFA interpolation algorithm and combining it with the feature extraction block in the camera identification model. Finally, we transfer the backdoor from the elaborated special network architecture to the classical architecture model via teacher-student distillation learning. Since the trigger of our method is related to the specific phone, our attack works effectively in the physical world. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach and robustness against various backdoor defenses.

RAW files are the initial measurement of scene radiance widely used in most cameras, and the ubiquitously-used RGB images are converted from RAW data through Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipelines. Nowadays, digital images are risky of being nefariously manipulated. Inspired by the fact that innate immunity is the first line of body defense, we propose DRAW, a novel scheme of defending images against manipulation by protecting their sources, i.e., camera-shooted RAWs. Specifically, we design a lightweight Multi-frequency Partial Fusion Network (MPF-Net) friendly to devices with limited computing resources by frequency learning and partial feature fusion. It introduces invisible watermarks as protective signal into the RAW data. The protection capability can not only be transferred into the rendered RGB images regardless of the applied ISP pipeline, but also is resilient to post-processing operations such as blurring or compression. Once the image is manipulated, we can accurately identify the forged areas with a localization network. Extensive experiments on several famous RAW datasets, e.g., RAISE, FiveK and SIDD, indicate the effectiveness of our method. We hope that this technique can be used in future cameras as an option for image protection, which could effectively restrict image manipulation at the source., Comment: To appear in ICCV 2023. The leading two authors contribute equally

The widespread use of face retouching filters on short-video platforms has raised concerns about the authenticity of digital appearances and the impact of deceptive advertising. To address these issues, there is a pressing need to develop advanced face retouching techniques. However, the lack of large-scale and fine-grained face retouching datasets has been a major obstacle to progress in this field. In this paper, we introduce RetouchingFFHQ, a large-scale and fine-grained face retouching dataset that contains over half a million conditionally-retouched images. RetouchingFFHQ stands out from previous datasets due to its large scale, high quality, fine-grainedness, and customization. By including four typical types of face retouching operations and different retouching levels, we extend the binary face retouching detection into a fine-grained, multi-retouching type, and multi-retouching level estimation problem. Additionally, we propose a Multi-granularity Attention Module (MAM) as a plugin for CNN backbones for enhanced cross-scale representation learning. Extensive experiments using different baselines as well as our proposed method on RetouchingFFHQ show decent performance on face retouching detection. With the proposed new dataset, we believe there is great potential for future work to tackle the challenging problem of real-world fine-grained face retouching detection., Comment: Under review

With the widespread applications of the deep neural network (DNN), how to covertly transmit the DNN models in public channels brings us the attention, especially for those trained for secret-learning tasks. In this paper, we propose deep network steganography for the covert communication of DNN models. Unlike the existing steganography schemes which focus on the subtle modification of the cover data to accommodate the secrets, our scheme is learning task oriented, where the learning task of the secret DNN model (termed as secret-learning task) is disguised into another ordinary learning task conducted in a stego DNN model (termed as stego-learning task). To this end, we propose a gradient-based filter insertion scheme to insert interference filters into the important positions in the secret DNN model to form a stego DNN model. These positions are then embedded into the stego DNN model using a key by side information hiding. Finally, we activate the interference filters by a partial optimization strategy, such that the generated stego DNN model works on the stego-learning task. We conduct the experiments on both the intra-task steganography and inter-task steganography (i.e., the secret and stego-learning tasks belong to the same and different categories), both of which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method for covert communication of DNN models., Comment: 8 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2302.14521

In modern social networks, existing style transfer methods suffer from a serious content leakage issue, which hampers the ability to achieve serial and reversible stylization, thereby hindering the further propagation of stylized images in social networks. To address this problem, we propose a leak-free style transfer method based on feature steganography. Our method consists of two main components: a style transfer method that accomplishes artistic stylization on the original image and an image steganography method that embeds content feature secrets on the stylized image. The main contributions of our work are as follows: 1) We identify and explain the phenomenon of content leakage and its underlying causes, which arise from content inconsistencies between the original image and its subsequent stylized image. 2) We design a neural flow model for achieving loss-free and biased-free style transfer. 3) We introduce steganography to hide content feature information on the stylized image and control the subsequent usage rights. 4) We conduct comprehensive experimental validation using publicly available datasets MS-COCO and Wikiart. The results demonstrate that StyleStegan successfully mitigates the content leakage issue in serial and reversible style transfer tasks. The SSIM performance metrics for these tasks are 14.98% and 7.28% higher, respectively, compared to a suboptimal baseline model., Comment: Under Review

Protecting deep neural networks (DNNs) against intellectual property (IP) infringement has attracted an increasing attention in recent years. Recent advances focus on IP protection of generative models, which embed the watermark information into the image generated by the model to be protected. Although the generated marked image has good visual quality, it introduces noticeable artifacts to the marked image in high-frequency area, which severely impairs the imperceptibility of the watermark and thereby reduces the security of the watermarking system. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for generative model watermarking that can suppress those high-frequency artifacts. The main idea of the proposed framework is to design a new watermark embedding network that can suppress high-frequency artifacts by applying anti-aliasing. To realize anti-aliasing, we use low-pass filtering for the internal sampling layers of the new watermark embedding network. Meanwhile, joint loss optimization and adversarial training are applied to enhance the effectiveness and robustness. Experimental results indicate that the marked model not only maintains the performance very well on the original task, but also demonstrates better imperceptibility and robustness on the watermarking task. This work reveals the importance of suppressing high-frequency artifacts for enhancing imperceptibility and security of generative model watermarking., Comment: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IdiF7M0AAAAJ&hl=en

Typically, foundation models are hosted on cloud servers to meet the high demand for their services. However, this exposes them to security risks, as attackers can modify them after uploading to the cloud or transferring from a local system. To address this issue, we propose an iterative decision-based fragile watermarking algorithm that transforms normal training samples into fragile samples that are sensitive to model changes. We then compare the output of sensitive samples from the original model to that of the compromised model during validation to assess the model's completeness.The proposed fragile watermarking algorithm is an optimization problem that aims to minimize the variance of the predicted probability distribution outputed by the target model when fed with the converted sample.We convert normal samples to fragile samples through multiple iterations. Our method has some advantages: (1) the iterative update of samples is done in a decision-based black-box manner, relying solely on the predicted probability distribution of the target model, which reduces the risk of exposure to adversarial attacks, (2) the small-amplitude multiple iterations approach allows the fragile samples to perform well visually, with a PSNR of 55 dB in TinyImageNet compared to the original samples, (3) even with changes in the overall parameters of the model of magnitude 1e-4, the fragile samples can detect such changes, and (4) the method is independent of the specific model structure and dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple models and datasets, and show that it outperforms the current state-of-the-art.

Generative steganography (GS) is a new data hiding manner, featuring direct generation of stego media from secret data. Existing GS methods are generally criticized for their poor performances. In this paper, we propose a novel flow based GS approach -- Generative Steganographic Flow (GSF), which provides direct generation of stego images without cover image. We take the stego image generation and secret data recovery process as an invertible transformation, and build a reversible bijective mapping between input secret data and generated stego images. In the forward mapping, secret data is hidden in the input latent of Glow model to generate stego images. By reversing the mapping, hidden data can be extracted exactly from generated stego images. Furthermore, we propose a novel latent optimization strategy to improve the fidelity of stego images. Experimental results show our proposed GSF has far better performances than SOTA works., Comment: The accepted paper in ICME 2022

Generative steganography (GS) is an emerging technique that generates stego images directly from secret data. Various GS methods based on GANs or Flow have been developed recently. However, existing GAN-based GS methods cannot completely recover the hidden secret data due to the lack of network invertibility, while Flow-based methods produce poor image quality due to the stringent reversibility restriction in each module. To address this issue, we propose a novel GS scheme called "Generative Steganography Diffusion" (GSD) by devising an invertible diffusion model named "StegoDiffusion". It not only generates realistic stego images but also allows for 100\% recovery of the hidden secret data. The proposed StegoDiffusion model leverages a non-Markov chain with a fast sampling technique to achieve efficient stego image generation. By constructing an ordinary differential equation (ODE) based on the transition probability of the generation process in StegoDiffusion, secret data and stego images can be converted to each other through the approximate solver of ODE -- Euler iteration formula, enabling the use of irreversible but more expressive network structures to achieve model invertibility. Our proposed GSD has the advantages of both reversibility and high performance, significantly outperforming existing GS methods in all metrics., Comment: Shall not be reproduced without permission, rights reserved!

Transmitting images for communication on social networks has become routine, which is helpful for covert communication. The traditional steganography algorithm is unable to successfully convey secret information since the social network channel will perform lossy operations on images, such as JPEG compression. Previous studies tried to solve this problem by enhancing the robustness or making the cover adapt to the channel processing. In this study, we proposed a robust image steganography method against lossy JPEG compression based on embedding domain selection and adaptive error correction. To improve anti-steganalysis performance, the embedding domain is selected adaptively. To increase robustness and lessen the impact on anti-steganalysis performance, the error correction capacity of the error correction code is adaptively adjusted to eliminate redundancy. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better anti-steganalysis and robustness.

The easy sharing of multimedia content on social media has caused a rapid dissemination of fake news, which threatens society's stability and security. Therefore, fake news detection has garnered extensive research interest in the field of social forensics. Current methods primarily concentrate on the integration of textual and visual features but fail to effectively exploit multi-modal information at both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels. Furthermore, they suffer from an ambiguity problem due to a lack of correlation between modalities or a contradiction between the decisions made by each modality. To overcome these challenges, we present a Multi-grained Multi-modal Fusion Network (MMFN) for fake news detection. Inspired by the multi-grained process of human assessment of news authenticity, we respectively employ two Transformer-based pre-trained models to encode token-level features from text and images. The multi-modal module fuses fine-grained features, taking into account coarse-grained features encoded by the CLIP encoder. To address the ambiguity problem, we design uni-modal branches with similarity-based weighting to adaptively adjust the use of multi-modal features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three prevalent datasets., Comment: Accepted by ICMR 2023

Steganography is a technique for covert communication between two parties. With the rapid development of deep neural networks (DNN), more and more steganographic networks are proposed recently, which are shown to be promising to achieve good performance. Unlike the traditional handcrafted steganographic tools, a steganographic network is relatively large in size. It raises concerns on how to covertly transmit the steganographic network in public channels, which is a crucial stage in the pipeline of steganography in real world applications. To address such an issue, we propose a novel scheme for steganography of steganographic networks in this paper. Unlike the existing steganographic schemes which focus on the subtle modification of the cover data to accommodate the secrets. We propose to disguise a steganographic network (termed as the secret DNN model) into a stego DNN model which performs an ordinary machine learning task (termed as the stego task). During the model disguising, we select and tune a subset of filters in the secret DNN model to preserve its function on the secret task, where the remaining filters are reactivated according to a partial optimization strategy to disguise the whole secret DNN model into a stego DNN model. The secret DNN model can be recovered from the stego DNN model when needed. Various experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for covert communication of steganographic networks as well as general DNN models., Comment: 7 pages

Recently, relying on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), many methods for salient object detection in optical remote sensing images (ORSI-SOD) are proposed. However, most methods ignore the huge parameters and computational cost brought by CNNs, and only a few pay attention to the portability and mobility. To facilitate practical applications, in this paper, we propose a novel lightweight network for ORSI-SOD based on semantic matching and edge alignment, termed SeaNet. Specifically, SeaNet includes a lightweight MobileNet-V2 for feature extraction, a dynamic semantic matching module (DSMM) for high-level features, an edge self-alignment module (ESAM) for low-level features, and a portable decoder for inference. First, the high-level features are compressed into semantic kernels. Then, semantic kernels are used to activate salient object locations in two groups of high-level features through dynamic convolution operations in DSMM. Meanwhile, in ESAM, cross-scale edge information extracted from two groups of low-level features is self-aligned through L2 loss and used for detail enhancement. Finally, starting from the highest-level features, the decoder infers salient objects based on the accurate locations and fine details contained in the outputs of the two modules. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our lightweight SeaNet not only outperforms most state-of-the-art lightweight methods but also yields comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art conventional methods, while having only 2.76M parameters and running with 1.7G FLOPs for 288x288 inputs. Our code and results are available at https://github.com/MathLee/SeaNet., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 2023

Wild images on the web are vulnerable to backdoor (also called trojan) poisoning, causing machine learning models learned on these images to be injected with backdoors. Most previous attacks assumed that the wild images are labeled. In reality, however, most images on the web are unlabeled. Specifically, we study the effects of unlabeled backdoor images under semi-supervised learning (SSL) on widely studied deep neural networks. To be realistic, we assume that the adversary is zero-knowledge and that the semi-supervised learning model is trained from scratch. Firstly, we find the fact that backdoor poisoning always fails when poisoned unlabeled images come from different classes, which is different from poisoning the labeled images. The reason is that the SSL algorithms always strive to correct them during training. Therefore, for unlabeled images, we implement backdoor poisoning on images from the target class. Then, we propose a gradient matching strategy to craft poisoned images such that their gradients match the gradients of target images on the SSL model, which can fit poisoned images to the target class and realize backdoor injection. To the best of our knowledge, this may be the first approach to backdoor poisoning on unlabeled images of trained-from-scratch SSL models. Experiments show that our poisoning achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates on most SSL algorithms while bypassing modern backdoor defenses.

Face manipulation detection has been receiving a lot of attention for the reliability and security of the face images. Recent studies focus on using auxiliary information or prior knowledge to capture robust manipulation traces, which are shown to be promising. As one of the important face features, the face depth map, which has shown to be effective in other areas such as the face recognition or face detection, is unfortunately paid little attention to in literature for detecting the manipulated face images. In this paper, we explore the possibility of incorporating the face depth map as auxiliary information to tackle the problem of face manipulation detection in real world applications. To this end, we first propose a Face Depth Map Transformer (FDMT) to estimate the face depth map patch by patch from a RGB face image, which is able to capture the local depth anomaly created due to manipulation. The estimated face depth map is then considered as auxiliary information to be integrated with the backbone features using a Multi-head Depth Attention (MDA) mechanism that is newly designed. Various experiments demonstrate the advantage of our proposed method for face manipulation detection., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

Digital images are vulnerable to nefarious tampering attacks such as content addition or removal that severely alter the original meaning. It is somehow like a person without protection that is open to various kinds of viruses. Image immunization (Imuge) is a technology of protecting the images by introducing trivial perturbation, so that the protected images are immune to the viruses in that the tampered contents can be auto-recovered. This paper presents Imuge+, an enhanced scheme for image immunization. By observing the invertible relationship between image immunization and the corresponding self-recovery, we employ an invertible neural network to jointly learn image immunization and recovery respectively in the forward and backward pass. We also introduce an efficient attack layer that involves both malicious tamper and benign image post-processing, where a novel distillation-based JPEG simulator is proposed for improved JPEG robustness. Our method achieves promising results in real-world tests where experiments show accurate tamper localization as well as high-fidelity content recovery. Additionally, we show superior performance on tamper localization compared to state-of-the-art schemes based on passive forensics., Comment: Under Review. Extended version of our ACMMM 2021 paper

Semantic segmentation is important for scene understanding. To address the scenes of adverse illumination conditions of natural images, thermal infrared (TIR) images are introduced. Most existing RGB-T semantic segmentation methods follow three cross-modal fusion paradigms, i.e. encoder fusion, decoder fusion, and feature fusion. Some methods, unfortunately, ignore the properties of RGB and TIR features or the properties of features at different levels. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion-based network for RGB-T semantic segmentation, named \emph{LASNet}, which follows three steps of location, activation, and sharpening. The highlight of LASNet is that we fully consider the characteristics of cross-modal features at different levels, and accordingly propose three specific modules for better segmentation. Concretely, we propose a Collaborative Location Module (CLM) for high-level semantic features, aiming to locate all potential objects. We propose a Complementary Activation Module for middle-level features, aiming to activate exact regions of different objects. We propose an Edge Sharpening Module (ESM) for low-level texture features, aiming to sharpen the edges of objects. Furthermore, in the training phase, we attach a location supervision and an edge supervision after CLM and ESM, respectively, and impose two semantic supervisions in the decoder part to facilitate network convergence. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that the superiority of our LASNet over relevant state-of-the-art methods. The code and results of our method are available at https://github.com/MathLee/LASNet., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 2022

Data hiding with deep neural networks (DNNs) has experienced impressive successes in recent years. A prevailing scheme is to train an autoencoder, consisting of an encoding network to embed (or transform) secret messages in (or into) a carrier, and a decoding network to extract the hidden messages. This scheme may suffer from several limitations regarding practicability, security, and embedding capacity. In this work, we describe a different computational framework to hide images in deep probabilistic models. Specifically, we use a DNN to model the probability density of cover images, and hide a secret image in one particular location of the learned distribution. As an instantiation, we adopt a SinGAN, a pyramid of generative adversarial networks (GANs), to learn the patch distribution of one cover image. We hide the secret image by fitting a deterministic mapping from a fixed set of noise maps (generated by an embedding key) to the secret image during patch distribution learning. The stego SinGAN, behaving as the original SinGAN, is publicly communicated; only the receiver with the embedding key is able to extract the secret image. We demonstrate the feasibility of our SinGAN approach in terms of extraction accuracy and model security. Moreover, we show the flexibility of the proposed method in terms of hiding multiple images for different receivers and obfuscating the secret image.

Intellectual property protection of deep neural networks is receiving attention from more and more researchers, and the latest research applies model watermarking to generative models for image processing. However, the existing watermarking methods designed for generative models do not take into account the effects of different channels of sample images on watermarking. As a result, the watermarking performance is still limited. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we first analyze the effects of embedding watermark information on different channels. Then, based on the characteristics of human visual system (HVS), we introduce two HVS-based generative model watermarking methods, which are realized in RGB color space and YUV color space respectively. In RGB color space, the watermark is embedded into the R and B channels based on the fact that HVS is more sensitive to G channel. In YUV color space, the watermark is embedded into the DCT domain of U and V channels based on the fact that HVS is more sensitive to brightness changes. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed work, which improves the fidelity of the model to be protected and has good universality compared with previous methods., Comment: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IdiF7M0AAAAJ&hl=en

3D mesh steganographic algorithms based on geometric modification are vulnerable to 3D steganalyzers. In this paper, we propose a highly adaptive 3D mesh steganography based on feature-preserving distortion (FPD), which guarantees high embedding capacity while effectively resisting 3D steganalysis. Specifically, we first transform vertex coordinates into integers and derive bitplanes from them to construct the embedding domain. To better measure the mesh distortion caused by message embedding, we propose FPD based on the most effective sub-features of the state-of-the-art steganalytic feature set. By improving and minimizing FPD, we can efficiently calculate the optimal vertex-changing distribution and simultaneously preserve mesh features, such as steganalytic and geometric features, to a certain extent. By virtue of the optimal distribution, we adopt the Q-layered syndrome trellis coding (STC) for practical message embedding. However, when Q varies, calculating bit modification probability (BMP) in each layer of Q-layered will be cumbersome. Hence, we contrapuntally design a universal and automatic BMP calculation approach. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms most state-of-the-art 3D mesh steganographic algorithms in terms of resisting 3D steganalysis., Comment: IEEE TVCG major revision

Considering the prospects of public key embedding (PKE) mechanism in active forensics on the integrity or identity of ciphertext for distributed deep learning security, two reversible data hiding in encrypted domain (RDH-ED) algorithms with PKE mechanism are proposed, in which all the elements of the embedding function shall be open to the public, while the extraction function could be performed only by legitimate users. The first algorithm is difference expansion in single bit encrypted domain (DE-SBED), which is optimized from the homomorphic embedding framework based on the bit operations of DE in spatial domain. DE-SBED is suitable for the ciphertext of images encrypted from any single bit encryption and learning with errors (LWE) encryption is selected in this paper. Pixel value ordering is introduced to reduce the distortion of decryption and improve the embedding rates (ER). To apply to more flexible applications, public key recoding on encryption redundancy (PKR-ER) algorithm is proposed. Public embedding key is constructed by recoding on the redundancy from the probabilistic decryption of LWE. It is suitable for any plaintext regardless of the type of medium or the content. By setting different quantization rules for recoding, decryption and extraction functions are separable. No distortion exists in the directly decrypted results of the marked ciphertext and ER could reach over 1.0 bits per bit of plaintext. Correctness and security of the algorithms are proved theoretically by deducing the probability distributions of ciphertext and quantization variable. Experimental results demonstrate the performances in correctness, one-way attribute of security and efficiency of the algorithms.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to malicious fine-tuning attacks such as data poisoning and backdoor attacks. Therefore, in recent research, it is proposed how to detect malicious fine-tuning of neural network models. However, it usually negatively affects the performance of the protected model. Thus, we propose a novel neural network fragile watermarking with no model performance degradation. In the process of watermarking, we train a generative model with the specific loss function and secret key to generate triggers that are sensitive to the fine-tuning of the target classifier. In the process of verifying, we adopt the watermarked classifier to get labels of each fragile trigger. Then, malicious fine-tuning can be detected by comparing secret keys and labels. Experiments on classic datasets and classifiers show that the proposed method can effectively detect model malicious fine-tuning with no model performance degradation., Comment: Published in 2022 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)

Recently, more and more attention has been focused on the intellectual property protection of deep neural networks (DNNs), promoting DNN watermarking to become a hot research topic. Compared with embedding watermarks directly into DNN parameters, inserting trigger-set watermarks enables us to verify the ownership without knowing the internal details of the DNN, which is more suitable for application scenarios. The cost is we have to carefully craft the trigger samples. Mainstream methods construct the trigger samples by inserting a noticeable pattern to the clean samples in the spatial domain, which does not consider sample imperceptibility, sample robustness and model robustness, and therefore has limited the watermarking performance and the model generalization. It has motivated the authors in this paper to propose a novel DNN watermarking method based on Fourier perturbation analysis and frequency sensitivity clustering. First, we analyze the perturbation impact of different frequency components of the input sample on the task functionality of the DNN by applying random perturbation. Then, by K-means clustering, we determine the frequency components that result in superior watermarking performance for crafting the trigger samples. Our experiments show that the proposed work not only maintains the performance of the DNN on its original task, but also provides better watermarking performance compared with related works., Comment: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IdiF7M0AAAAJ&hl=en

Steganography usually modifies cover media to embed secret data. A new steganographic approach called generative steganography (GS) has emerged recently, in which stego images (images containing secret data) are generated from secret data directly without cover media. However, existing GS schemes are often criticized for their poor performances. In this paper, we propose an advanced generative steganography network (GSN) that can generate realistic stego images without using cover images. We firstly introduce the mutual information mechanism in GS, which helps to achieve high secret extraction accuracy. Our model contains four sub-networks, i.e., an image generator ($G$), a discriminator ($D$), a steganalyzer ($S$), and a data extractor ($E$). $D$ and $S$ act as two adversarial discriminators to ensure the visual quality and security of generated stego images. $E$ is to extract the hidden secret from generated stego images. The generator $G$ is flexibly constructed to synthesize either cover or stego images with different inputs. It facilitates covert communication by concealing the function of generating stego images in a normal generator. A module named secret block is designed to hide secret data in the feature maps during image generation, with which high hiding capacity and image fidelity are achieved. In addition, a novel hierarchical gradient decay (HGD) skill is developed to resist steganalysis detection. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our work over existing methods.