A Face Tampering Detection Method Based on Pulse Features
(School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China)
Abstract
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and digital image processing technology, maliciously tampered face videos spread widely on the Internet, causing non-negligible security hazards and ethical challenges to social life. Traditional face tampering detection methods rely on appearance texture and deep learning features, and are vulnerable to illumination interference, difficult to defend against high-fidelity deepfake and 3D mask attacks, and lacking in the mining of robust living-body features. To solve the above defects, this paper proposes a face tampering detection method based on facial pulse physiological features. Relying on the principle of remote photoplethysmography, the proposed method extracts weak temporal pulse signals from effective facial regions, converts time-domain signals into frequency-domain features via Fourier transform, and realizes face liveness detection using a support vector machine model. Compared with traditional texture feature extraction methods, the proposed method adopts unfalsifiable physiological signals as the discrimination criterion, which can effectively identify various face tampering attacks, including photo replay, screen shooting and 3D face forgery. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 86.3%, a precision of 84.0%, a recall of 82.0%, and an F1-score of 83.0% on the 3DMAD dataset. The method outperforms existing related methods and can effectively resist attacks from printed photos, video replays and 3D masks.
Keywords
face tampering detection; remote photoplethysmography; frequency domain feature; liveness detection
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Funding
Guangdong Medical Science and Technology Research Foundation Project of Guangdong Provincial Health Commission (B2026258); 2025 Guangdong Vocational Digital Transformation Steering Committee Teaching Reform and Research Project (2025SZXZH007); Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational College Project on Building a New Digital Teaching Ecosystem (2025JGZX04, 2025JGZX07); Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational College Education and Teaching Reform Project (2025JGZX02); Guangdong Medical Science and Technology Research Foundation Project of Guangdong Provincial Health Commission (A2024402); Guangdong Provincial Education Science Planning Project (2024GXJK182); Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational College Natural Science Research Project (2024ZR13)
About the authors
BIAN Mingyun (1993—), male, Han ethnicity, born in Jining, Shandong, lecturer, master's supervisor, doctor. Research interests: privacy preservation and AI security.