Focus on Finding Deepfakes: A Robust Proactive Detection Method Based on Orthogonal Moment Watermarking

Deepfake detection remains a challenging research topic, especially when the quality of forged images degrades, leading to unreliable detection results. In this paper, we propose a watermarking-based proactive method for robust proactive deepfake detection. First, we embed a watermark into the Fractional-order Quaternion Exponent Moments (FrQEMs) space of the host face image, achieving a balance between imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarking algorithm. Then, we introduce the Frequency Mamba (FreMamba) block to enhance feature extraction by leveraging correlations between frequency-domain subbands, thereby enabling the extraction of more discriminative feature representations. Finally, at the detection stage, we construct a dual-branch framework comprising a watermark extractor and a forgery discriminator. Through knowledge distillation, the watermark extractor guides the forgery discriminator to perceive forgery traces. Specifically, the integrity of the extracted watermark is compromised only when the host image is subjected to a deepfake attack, while conventional attacks do not affect the integrity. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior deepfake detection accuracy. In particular, when images are subjected to conventional attacks, our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by more than 5.3% in terms of ACC.