DF-UDetector: An effective method towards robust deepfake detection via feature restoration.

The abuse of deepfakes, a rising face swap technique, causes severe concerns about the authenticity of visual content and the dissemination of misinformation. To alleviate the threats imposed by deepfakes, a vast body of data-centric detectors has been deployed. However, the performance of these methods can be easily defected by degradations on deepfakes. To improve the performance of degradation deepfake detection, we creatively explore the recovery method in the feature space to preserve the artifacts for detection instead of directly in the image domain. In this paper, we propose a method, namely DF-UDetector, against degradation deepfakes by modeling the degraded images and transforming the extracted features to a high-quality level. To be specific, the whole model consists of three key components: an image feature extractor to capture image features, a feature transforming module to map the degradation features into a higher quality, and a discriminator to determine whether the feature map is of high quality enough. Extensive experiments on multiple video datasets show that our proposed model performs comparably or even better than state-of-the-art counterparts. Moreover, DF-UDetector outperforms by a small margin when detecting deepfakes in the wild.