MD-CSDNetwork: Multi-Domain Cross Stitched Network for Deepfake Detection

The rapid progress in the ease of creating and spreading ultra-realistic media over social platforms calls for an urgent need to develop a generalizable deepfake detection technique. It has been observed that current deepfake generation methods leave discriminative artifacts in the frequency spectrum of fake images and videos. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we present a novel approach, termed as MD-CSDNetwork, for combining the features in the spatial and frequency domains to extract a shared discriminative representation for classifying deepfakes. MD-CSDNetwork is a novel cross-stitched network with two parallel branches carrying spatial and frequency information, respectively. We hypothesize that these multi-domain input data streams can be considered as related supervisory signals and can ensure better performance and generalization. Further, the concept of cross-stitch connections is utilized where they are inserted between the two branches to learn an optimal combination of domain-specific and shared representations from other domains automatically. Extensive experiments are conducted on the popular benchmark datasets. We report improvements over all the manipulation types in the FaceForensics++ dataset and comparable results with state-of-the-art methods for cross-database evaluation on the Celeb-DF dataset and the Deepfake Detection Dataset.