EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
Anti-forensic for quantization steps estimation based on direct and preemptive adversarial attacks
- Jiawei Zhang
- Mengjie Wang
- Hao Wu
- Xin Cheng
- Xiangyang Luo
- Bin Ma
- Hao Wang
- Jinwei Wang
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) quantization steps estimation aims to reveal the compressed history of the images, which can serve as an essential component and powerful technique to support forensics. Nowadays, various deep learning-based estimation methods have been proposed to achieve higher accuracy. However, due to supposing the ideal secure conditions of estimation, their robustness against deliberate attacks (especially adversarial attacks) has not been thoroughly studied, which poses a significant threat to their reliability. To address this issue, as the first attempt, we investigate the robustness of deep learning-based estimation methods against adversarial attacks, which can significantly deteriorate estimation accuracy without noticeable distortion. Specifically, we introduce a generation-based adversarial attack framework and propose two types of anti-forensic attacks, Direct Attack (DA) and Preemptive Attack (PA), to craft adversarial examples on double and single compressed images. To maximize the attack ability, we study the effect of regression and classification objectives on the adversarial property and design a joint loss function for stable and smooth optimization. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed DA and PA can achieve a high attack ability with low perturbation magnitude and satisfactory visual quality. More importantly, the generated adversarial examples present superior transferability across different estimation models and datasets, which proves the generality of the proposed method and also reveals the vulnerability of the existing deep learning-based estimation methods towards adversarial examples. Our code will be publicly available soon.