Efficient Vision-Based Face Image Manipulation Identification Framework Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

Image manipulation of the human face is a trending topic of image forgery, which is done by transforming or altering face regions using a set of techniques to accomplish desired outputs. Manipulated face images are spreading on the internet due to the rise of social media, causing various societal threats. It is challenging to detect the manipulated face images effectively because (i) there has been a limited number of manipulated face datasets because most datasets contained images generated by GAN models; (ii) previous studies have mainly extracted handcrafted features and fed them into machine learning algorithms to perform manipulated face detection, which was complicated, error-prone, and laborious; and (iii) previous models failed to prove why their model achieved good performances. In order to address these issues, this study introduces a large face manipulation dataset containing vast variations of manipulated images created and manually validated using various manipulation techniques. The dataset is then used to train a fine-tuned RegNet model to detect manipulated face images robustly and efficiently. Finally, a manipulated region analysis technique is implemented to provide some in-depth insights into the manipulated regions. The experimental results revealed that the RegNet model showed the highest classification accuracy of 89% on the proposed dataset compared to standard deep learning models.