Curvelet-Based Frequency-Aware Feature Enhancement for Deepfake Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sabri, Salar Adel, Mstafa, Ramadhan J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Sabri, Salar Adel
Mstafa, Ramadhan J.
author_facet Sabri, Salar Adel
Mstafa, Ramadhan J.
contents The proliferation of sophisticated generative models has significantly advanced the realism of synthetic facial content, known as deepfakes, raising serious concerns about digital trust. Although modern deep learning-based detectors perform well, many rely on spatial-domain features that degrade under compression. This limitation has prompted a shift toward integrating frequency-domain representations with deep learning to improve robustness. Prior research has explored frequency transforms such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and Wavelet Transform, among others. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Curvelet Transform, despite its superior directional and multiscale properties, remains entirely unexplored in the context of deepfake detection. In this work, we introduce a novel Curvelet-based detection approach that enhances feature quality through wedge-level attention and scale-aware spatial masking, both trained to selectively emphasize discriminative frequency components. The refined frequency cues are reconstructed and passed to a modified pretrained Xception network for classification. Evaluated on two compression qualities in the challenging FaceForensics++ dataset, our method achieves 98.48% accuracy and 99.96% AUC on FF++ low compression, while maintaining strong performance under high compression, demonstrating the efficacy and interpretability of Curvelet-informed forgery detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_12028
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Curvelet-Based Frequency-Aware Feature Enhancement for Deepfake Detection
Sabri, Salar Adel
Mstafa, Ramadhan J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The proliferation of sophisticated generative models has significantly advanced the realism of synthetic facial content, known as deepfakes, raising serious concerns about digital trust. Although modern deep learning-based detectors perform well, many rely on spatial-domain features that degrade under compression. This limitation has prompted a shift toward integrating frequency-domain representations with deep learning to improve robustness. Prior research has explored frequency transforms such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and Wavelet Transform, among others. However, to the best of our knowledge, the Curvelet Transform, despite its superior directional and multiscale properties, remains entirely unexplored in the context of deepfake detection. In this work, we introduce a novel Curvelet-based detection approach that enhances feature quality through wedge-level attention and scale-aware spatial masking, both trained to selectively emphasize discriminative frequency components. The refined frequency cues are reconstructed and passed to a modified pretrained Xception network for classification. Evaluated on two compression qualities in the challenging FaceForensics++ dataset, our method achieves 98.48% accuracy and 99.96% AUC on FF++ low compression, while maintaining strong performance under high compression, demonstrating the efficacy and interpretability of Curvelet-informed forgery detection.
title Curvelet-Based Frequency-Aware Feature Enhancement for Deepfake Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12028