A novel assessment framework for learning-based deepfake detectors in realistic conditions

Detecting manipulations in facial images and video has become an increasingly popular topic in media forensics community. At the same time, deep convolutional neural networks have achieved exceptional results on deepfake detection tasks. Despite the remarkable progress, the performance of such detectors is often evaluated on benchmarks under constrained and non-realistic situations. In fact, current assessment and ranking approaches employed in related benchmarks or competitions are unreliable. The impact of conventional distortions and processing operations found in image and video processing workflows, such as compression, noise, and enhancement, is not sufficiently evaluated. This paper proposes a more rigorous framework to assess the performance of learning-based deepfake detectors in more realistic situations. This framework can serve as a broad benchmarking approach for both general model performance assessment and the ranking of proponents in a competition. In addition, a stochastic degradation-based data augmentation strategy driven by realistic processing operations is designed, which significantly improves the generalization ability of two deepfake detectors.