Cited by 1,237Digital Media Forensic DetectionFace recognition and analysisGenerative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis

Deepfakes and beyond: A Survey of face manipulation and fake detection

Open access
Tolosana, Ruben, Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben, Fierrez, Julian, Morales, Aythami, Ortega-Garcia, Javier·2020·Information Fusion

Abstract

The free access to large-scale public databases, together with the fast progress of deep learning techniques, in particular Generative Adversarial Networks, have led to the generation of very realistic fake content with its corresponding implications towards society in this era of fake news. This survey provides a thorough review of techniques for manipulating face images including DeepFake methods, and methods to detect such manipulations. In particular, four types of facial manipulation are reviewed: i) entire face synthesis, ii) identity swap (DeepFakes), iii) attribute manipulation, and iv) expression swap. For each manipulation group, we provide details regarding manipulation techniques, existing public databases, and key benchmarks for technology evaluation of fake detection methods, including a summary of results from those evaluations. Among all the aspects discussed in the survey, we pay special attention to the latest generation of DeepFakes, highlighting its improvements and challenges for fake detection. In addition to the survey information, we also discuss open issues and future trends that should be considered to advance in the field.

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  • Most supervised deepfake detection methods are very effective when the target video has been generated with a manipulation present in training, and almost useless otherwise.

    “These methods are typically very effective when the target video has been generated with a manipulation present in training, and almost useless otherwise [57, 58].”

    From Audio-Visual Person-of-Interest DeepFake Detection (2023) · cites this paper as [57]

    The survey says detectors achieve very low error rates when evaluated under the conditions in which they were trained (Audio-to-Video and Text-to-Video section). Its Manipulation Detection section reports poor generalisation to unseen databases, with most approaches scoring below 60% AUC on second-generation DeepFake databases. That supports a substantial performance drop, but does not establish that detectors are almost useless whenever the manipulation was absent from training. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Recent works on adversarial perturbation attacks to fool DNN-based detectors make the deepfake detection task more difficult.

    “Recent works on adversarial perturbation attacks to fool DNN-based detectors make the deepfake detection task more difficult [157, 171–174].”

    From Deep learning for deepfakes creation and detection: A survey (2022) · cites this paper as [157]

    The Manipulation Detection section (page unavailable) reports that simple image perturbations can undermine a deep-learning detector and that altered synthetic images can spoof fake detectors. The survey thus supports the claim that such attacks make detection harder, but the passages do not specifically establish recent work on adversarial perturbations designed to fool DNN-based detectors. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Various fake detection techniques are already based on the synthesis of various information sources, such as steroids and DL features, spatial and spectral characteristics, or other combinations.

    “In fact, they highlight several instances where various fake detection techniques are already based on the synthesis of various information sources, such as steroids and DL features, spatial and spectral characteristics, or other combinations thereof.”

    From Deepfakes: current and future trends (2024) · cites this paper as Tolosana et al. (2020)

    The Audio-to-Video and Text-to-Video section says that fake detectors combine different information sources, including spatial and spectral features. It names steganalysis and deep-learning features—not “steroids” and deep-learning features—as the other example. No page number is provided in the supplied copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Existing surveys lack a comprehensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate the practical efficacy of state-of-the-art methods.

    “They lack a comprehensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate the practical eicacy of state-of-the-art methods.”

    From DEEPFAKER: A Unified Evaluation Platform for Facial Deepfake and Detection Models (2024) · cites this paper as [68]

    In the introductory discussion of other surveys (page not available), the paper says its review adds a more detailed account of detection benchmarks and their results. That supports a narrower claim about the detail of earlier surveys, but it does not establish that existing surveys generally lack a comprehensive experimental evaluation of state-of-the-art methods. (LLM, conf=0.76)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • This review differs from previous reviews, which focus primarily on the performance of automated deepfake detectors.

    “This review di ff ers from previous reviews, which focus primarily on the performance of automated deepfake detectors [1].”

    From Human Performance in Deepfake Detection: A Systematic Review (2025) · cites this paper as [1]

    The Manipulation Detection section compares automated detectors and their performance, so the cited review does cover that subject. But the introduction says it also reviews manipulation techniques and public databases in detail; it does not establish that previous reviews focus primarily on detector performance. Our copy gives no page numbers for these passages. (LLM, conf=0.79)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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12 of the 213 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 14

  1. [13]13. J. Galbally, S. Marcel, and J. Fierrez, "Biometric Anti-Spoofing Meth- ods: A Survey in Face Recognition," IEEE Access, vol. 2, pp. 1530- 1552, 2014.
  2. [15]15. S. Marcel, M. Nixon, J. Fierrez, and N. Evans, Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing (2nd Edition), 2019.
  3. [18]18. C. Canton, L. Davis, E. Delp, P. Flynn, S. McCloskey, L. Leal-Taixe, P. Natsev, and C. Bregler, "Applications of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition to Media Forensics," in IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://sites.google.com/view/mediaforensics2019
  4. [19]19. B. Biggio, P. Korshunov, T. Mensink, G. Patrini, D. Rao, and A. Sadhu, "Synthetic Realities: Deep Learning for Detecting AudioVisual Fakes," in International Conference on Machine Learning, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://sites.google.com/view/audiovisualfakes-icml2019/
  5. [21]21. K. Raja, N. Damer, C. Chen, A. Dantcheva, A. Czajka, H. Han, and R. Ramachandra, "Workshop on Deepfakes and Presentation Attacks in Biometrics," in IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://sites.google.com/ view/wacv2020-deeppab/
  6. [22]22. M. Barni, S. Battiato, G. Boato, H. Farid, and N. Memon, "MultiMedia Forensics in the Wild," in IEEE International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://iplab.dmi. unict.it/mmforwild/
  7. [25]25. I. Goodfellow, J. Pouget-Abadie, M. Mirza, B. Xu, D. Warde-Farley, S. Ozair, A. Courville, and Y. Bengio, "Generative Adversarial Nets," in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2014.
  8. [61]61. N. Hulzebosch, Sarah Ibrahimi and Marcel Worring, "Detecting CNN- Generated Facial Images in Real-World Scenarios," in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2020.
  9. [74]74. M. Binkowski, D. Sutherland, M. Arbel, and A. Gretton, "Demysti- fying MMD GANs," in Proc. International Conference on Learning Representations, 2018.
  10. [76]76. D. Kingma and P. Dhariwal, "Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions," in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Process- ing Systems, 2018.
  11. [100]100. R. Tolosana, S. Romero-Tapiador, J. Fierrez and R. Vera-Rodriguez, "DeepFakes Evolution: Analysis of Facial Regions and Fake Detection Performance," arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07532, 2020. · arXiv
  12. [108]108. T. Soukupová and J. Cech, "Eye Blink Detection Using Facial Land- marks," in Proc. Computer Vision Winter Workshop, 2016.
  13. [119]119. S. Sabour, N. Frosst and G.E. Hinton, "Dynamic Routing Between Cap- sules," in Proc. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017, pp. 3856-3866.
  14. [202]202. Javier Ortega-Garcia received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree (cum laude) in electrical engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, in 1989 and 1996, respectively. He is currently a Full Professor at the Signal Processing Chair in Universidad Autonoma de Madrid -Spain, where he holds courses on biometric recognition and digital signal processing. He is a founder and Director of the BiDA-Lab, Biometrics and Data Pattern Analytics Group. He has authored over 300 international contributions, including book chapters, refereed journal, and conference papers. His research interests are focused on biometric pattern recognition (on-line signature verification, speaker recognition, human-device interaction) for security, e- health and user profiling applications. He chaired Odyssey-04, The Speaker Recognition Workshop, ICB-2013, the 6th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics, and ICCST2017, the 51st IEEE International Carnahan Confer- ence on Security Technology.

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Authors
Tolosana, R., Vera-Rodriguez, R., Fierrez, J., Morales, A., & Ortega-Garcia, J.
Affiliations
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (ES)
Venue
Information Fusion
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2020-12
Volume
64
Pages
131-148
ISSN
1566-2535 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2998718632
Cited by
1,237
References
213
Citations by year
2026: 238 · 2025: 264 · 2024: 200 · 2023: 166 · 2022: 181 · 2021: 131 · 2020: 57
FWCI
52.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Information Fusion (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Hispana (submittedVersion)
  • Biblos-e Archivo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Federación Española de Enfermedades Raras (RTI2018-101248-B-I00)
  • Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (MFC2018)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Digital Media Forensic Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Face recognition and analysis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Keywords
deepfakes, face manipulation, generative adversarial networks, face synthesis, fake news, benchmark dataset

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