A War Beyond Deepfake: Benchmarking Facial Counterfeits and Countermeasures
This work addresses the threat of visual forgeries to information security, which impacts areas like fake news and political warfare, but it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques through benchmarking.
The authors tackled the problem of sophisticated visual forgeries, such as deepfakes, by creating a benchmark that integrates state-of-the-art counterfeit generators and detectors to measure their performance using various criteria, providing in-depth insights into visual forensics.
In recent years, visual forgery has reached a level of sophistication that humans cannot identify fraud, which poses a significant threat to information security. A wide range of malicious applications have emerged, such as fake news, defamation or blackmailing of celebrities, impersonation of politicians in political warfare, and the spreading of rumours to attract views. As a result, a rich body of visual forensic techniques has been proposed in an attempt to stop this dangerous trend. In this paper, we present a benchmark that provides in-depth insights into visual forgery and visual forensics, using a comprehensive and empirical approach. More specifically, we develop an independent framework that integrates state-of-the-arts counterfeit generators and detectors, and measure the performance of these techniques using various criteria. We also perform an exhaustive analysis of the benchmarking results, to determine the characteristics of the methods that serve as a comparative reference in this never-ending war between measures and countermeasures.