Band-Attention Modulation Network for Robust Face Forgery Detection

Face forgery detectors often achieve strong results on controlled benchmarks, but their reliability under realistic image degradations remains limited. This paper presents a standardized benchmark for face forgery detection using the Multi-Dimensional Face Forgery Image (MFFI) dataset and evaluates performance on both clean and degraded test partitions. We compare six model families, including convolutional networks, transformer-based models, and a frozen self-supervised DINOv3 backbone, across spatial, spectral, and hybrid input representations. The results show that clean-set performance is not a reliable indicator of robustness under compression, resizing, and blurring. Xception with RGB obtains the best clean performance, reaching 0.884 mean ROC-AUC, but degrades substantially on the harder partition. In contrast, frozen DINOv3 achieves the strongest degraded-set result, with 0.726 mean ROC-AUC, while training only a linear classification head. The representation analysis indicates that Fourier-domain cues are most useful when combined with RGB information, whereas purely spectral inputs consistently underperform spatial representations. Qualitative attribution maps further suggest that convolutional detectors focus on localized artifacts, while DINOv3 relies on broader facial structure. These findings reinforce the need for degraded evaluation protocols and highlight self-supervised visual representations as a promising direction for robust face forgery detection. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/lucasdocunha/FaceForgery-Benchmark/.

The increasing availability of advanced image editing tools has led to a significant rise in manipulated digital content, posing serious challenges for digital forensics and information security. This study presents a transfer learning-based framework for digital image forgery detection that integrates compression-aware feature enhancement with deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. The proposed approach introduces a hybrid input representation that combines RGB images with compression difference-based features (FDIFF), explicitly highlighting subtle manipulation artifacts that are often difficult to detect. In addition, a model-specific adaptive threshold optimization strategy based on the Youden Index is employed to improve classification reliability by achieving a better balance between true positive and false positive rates. Experiments conducted on the CASIA v2.0 dataset using multiple pretrained CNN architectures, including DenseNet121, VGG16, ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, MobileNet, and InceptionV3, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. The models are evaluated using comprehensive performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The results show that DenseNet121 achieves the highest accuracy and AUC, while ResNet50 provides the most balanced and reliable predictions with the highest MCC. The findings emphasize that relying solely on accuracy is insufficient for forensic applications, where minimizing false negatives is critical. Overall, the proposed framework improves the visibility of manipulation artifacts and enhances classification robustness, making it suitable for real-world digital image forgery detection scenarios.

The rapid advancement of deepfakes necessitates robust face forgery detection. Although forged faces may lack obvious artifacts, they often contain subtle disharmony among different facial regions. We propose SGF-CDNet, a Consistency-Discrepancy Graph Network (CD-GNN) over Semantic-Geometric Fused (SGF) nodes. First, SGF-CDNet constructs SGF nodes by deeply fusing semantic regions from face parsing with geometric information from facial landmarks, allowing nodes to capture both high-level concepts and precise geometric constraints. Next, a dual-path CD-GNN performs parallel relational reasoning on these nodes across two dimensions: consistency and discrepancy. The consistency path evaluates if facial components follow natural biological patterns, while the discrepancy path mines for structural tensions and feature conflicts introduced by forgeries. By integrating these processes, our model effectively identifies disharmonious relationships between facial components. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that SGF-CDNet achieves superior performance, establishing it as a reliable solution for face forgery detection.