FSBI: Deepfake detection with frequency enhanced self-blended images

Advances in deepfake research have led to the creation of almost perfect image manipulations that are undetectable to the human eye and some deepfake detection tools. Recently, several techniques have been proposed to differentiate deepfakes from real images and videos. This study introduces a frequency enhanced self-blended images (FSBI) approach for deepfake detection. This proposed approach utilizes discrete wavelet transforms (DWT) to extract discriminative features from self-blended images (SBI). The features are then used to train a convolutional network architecture model. SBIs blend the image with itself by introducing several forgery artifacts in a copy of the image before blending it. This prevents the classifier from overfitting specific artifacts by learning more generic representations. These blended images are then fed into the frequency feature extractor to detect artifacts that could not be detected easily in the time domain. The proposed approach was evaluated on FF++ and Celeb-DF datasets, and the obtained results outperformed state-of-the-art techniques using the cross-dataset evaluation protocol, achieving an AUC of 95.49% on Celeb-DF dataset. It also achieved competitive performance in the within-dataset evaluation setup. These results highlight the robustness and effectiveness of our method in addressing the challenging generalization problem inherent in deepfake detection. The code is available at https://github.com/gufranSabri/FSBI.