Deepfake Detection of Face Images based on a Convolutional Neural Network

Fake News and especially deepfakes (generated, non-real image or video content) have become a serious topic over the last years. With the emergence of machine learning algorithms it is now easier than ever before to generate such fake content, even for private persons. This issue of generated fake images is especially critical in the context of politics and public figures. We want to address this conflict by building a model based on a Convolutions Neural Network in order to detect such generated and fake images showing human portraits. As a basis, we use a pre-trained ResNet-50 model due to its effectiveness in terms of classifying images. We then adopted the base model to our task of classifying a single image as authentic/real or fake by adding an fully connected output layer containing a single neuron indicating the authenticity of an image. We applied fine tuning and transfer learning to develop the model and improve its parameters. For the training process we collected the image data set "Diverse Face Fake Dataset" containing a wide range of different image manipulation methods and also diversity in terms of faces visible on the images. With our final model we reached the following outstanding performance metrics: precision = 0.98, recall 0.96, F1-Score = 0.97 and an area-under-curve = 0.99.