Realism to Deception: Investigating Deepfake Detectors Against Face Enhancement

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Saeed, Muhammad Saad, Haq, Ijaz Ul, Malik, Khalid
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Saeed, Muhammad Saad
Haq, Ijaz Ul
Malik, Khalid
author_facet Saeed, Muhammad Saad
Haq, Ijaz Ul
Malik, Khalid
contents Face enhancement techniques are widely used to enhance facial appearance. However, they can inadvertently distort biometric features, leading to significant decrease in the accuracy of deepfake detectors. This study hypothesizes that these techniques, while improving perceptual quality, can degrade the performance of deepfake detectors. To investigate this, we systematically evaluate whether commonly used face enhancement methods can serve an anti-forensic role by reducing detection accuracy. We use both traditional image processing methods and advanced GAN-based enhancements to evaluate the robustness of deepfake detectors. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of these enhancement techniques, focusing on their impact on Naïve, Spatial, and Frequency-based detection methods. Furthermore, we conduct adversarial training experiments to assess whether exposure to face enhancement transformations improves model robustness. Experiments conducted on the FaceForensics++, DeepFakeDetection, and CelebDF-v2 datasets indicate that even basic enhancement filters can significantly reduce detection accuracy achieving ASR up to 64.63\%. In contrast, GAN-based techniques further exploit these vulnerabilities, achieving ASR up to 75.12\%. Our results demonstrate that face enhancement methods can effectively function as anti-forensic tools, emphasizing the need for more resilient and adaptive forensic methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_07178
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Realism to Deception: Investigating Deepfake Detectors Against Face Enhancement
Saeed, Muhammad Saad
Haq, Ijaz Ul
Malik, Khalid
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Face enhancement techniques are widely used to enhance facial appearance. However, they can inadvertently distort biometric features, leading to significant decrease in the accuracy of deepfake detectors. This study hypothesizes that these techniques, while improving perceptual quality, can degrade the performance of deepfake detectors. To investigate this, we systematically evaluate whether commonly used face enhancement methods can serve an anti-forensic role by reducing detection accuracy. We use both traditional image processing methods and advanced GAN-based enhancements to evaluate the robustness of deepfake detectors. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of these enhancement techniques, focusing on their impact on Naïve, Spatial, and Frequency-based detection methods. Furthermore, we conduct adversarial training experiments to assess whether exposure to face enhancement transformations improves model robustness. Experiments conducted on the FaceForensics++, DeepFakeDetection, and CelebDF-v2 datasets indicate that even basic enhancement filters can significantly reduce detection accuracy achieving ASR up to 64.63\%. In contrast, GAN-based techniques further exploit these vulnerabilities, achieving ASR up to 75.12\%. Our results demonstrate that face enhancement methods can effectively function as anti-forensic tools, emphasizing the need for more resilient and adaptive forensic methods.
title Realism to Deception: Investigating Deepfake Detectors Against Face Enhancement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07178