Deepfake Detection via Exploring Degradation Inconsistency

The detection of face forgery has become increasingly vital due to the severe security concerns posed by face manipulation techniques. While recent studies on forgery detection have demonstrated promising results when the training and testing samples come from the same domains, the problem remains challenging when attempting to extend the detector to unseen methods. In this work, we propose an innovative approach to enhance the generalization capability of forgery detection methods by exploring degradation inconsistency clues interspersed between the background and the manipulated face regions. Our motivation stems from the observation that digital photos undergo different degradation during acquisition and transmission, resulting in backgrounds and faces from different sources containing distinct degradation patterns in the forged faces. The proposed framework, termed the Degradation Consistency Learning Framework, integrates two core components: a data generation network that modulates degradation transformations to obtain tampered facial images, and a detection network that mines degradation inconsistency clues from both spatial and frequency domains. These two components are tightly coupled through adversarial training, forming a dynamic architecture akin to a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Experimental results on different benchmark and evaluation protocols (i.e., indataset and cross-dataset) have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.