Tracing Copied Pixels and Regularizing Patch Affinity in Copy Detection

Image Copy Detection (ICD) aims to identify manipulated content between image pairs through robust feature representation learning. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has advanced ICD systems, existing view-level contrastive methods struggle with sophisticated edits due to insufficient fine-grained correspondence learning. We address this limitation by exploiting the inherent geometric traceability in edited content through two key innovations. First, we propose PixTrace - a pixel coordinate tracking module that maintains explicit spatial mappings across editing transformations. Second, we introduce CopyNCE, a geometrically-guided contrastive loss that regularizes patch affinity using overlap ratios derived from PixTrace's verified mappings. Our method bridges pixel-level traceability with patch-level similarity learning, suppressing supervision noise in SSL training. Extensive experiments demonstrate not only state-of-the-art performance (88.7\% $\mu$AP / 83.9\% RP90 for matcher, 72.6\% $\mu$AP / 68.4\% RP90 for descriptor on DISC21 dataset) but also better interpretability over existing methods. Code is available.