Cited by 3,314Digital Media Forensic DetectionAdvanced Steganography and Watermarking TechniquesBenford’s Law and Fraud Detection

FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images

Open access
Rossler, Andreas, Cozzolino, Davide, Verdoliva, Luisa, Riess, Christian, Thies, Justus, Niessner, Matthias·2019·2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Abstract

The rapid progress in synthetic image generation and manipulation has now come to a point where it raises significant concerns for the implications towards society. At best, this leads to a loss of trust in digital content, but could potentially cause further harm by spreading false information or fake news. This paper examines the realism of state-of-the-art image manipulations, and how difficult it is to detect them, either automatically or by humans. To standardize the evaluation of detection methods, we propose an automated benchmark for facial manipulation detection. In particular, the benchmark is based on Deep-Fakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap and NeuralTextures as prominent representatives for facial manipulations at random compression level and size. The benchmark is publicly available and contains a hidden test set as well as a database of over 1.8 million manipulated images. This dataset is over an order of magnitude larger than comparable, publicly available, forgery datasets. Based on this data, we performed a thorough analysis of data-driven forgery detectors. We show that the use of additional domain-specific knowledge improves forgery detection to unprecedented accuracy, even in the presence of strong compression, and clearly outperforms human observers.

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Crossref · 10.1109/iccv.2019.00009

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  • In the cross-manipulation evaluation, only the forgery algorithm is altered, while other factors such as background and identity remain consistent across all the different forgeries.

    “In this evaluation, only the forgery algorithm is altered. Other factors such as background and identity remain consistent across all the different forgeries.”

    From DeepfakeBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Deepfake Detection (2023) · cites this paper as [33]

    The database description (§3; page unavailable) says the dataset uses four manipulation methods, but the claim that identity remains consistent across their forgeries conflicts with the paper’s description of those methods. In “Additional information” (page unavailable), the paper says facial reenactment retains the target person’s identity, whereas face swapping replaces the target face with the source face. Thus the forgery algorithm is not the only thing that changes. (LLM, conf=0.85)

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  • FaceForensics++ is a widely used visual-only deepfake dataset containing 5000 videos generated by four methods.

    “FaceForensics++ [51] is a widely used visual-only deepfake dataset containing 5000 videos generated using four distinct deepfake generation methods.”

    From Deepfake Media Forensics: Status and Future Challenges (2025) · cites this paper as [51]

    Section 3, “Large-Scale Facial Forgery Database” (page unavailable), identifies four manipulation methods and 1,000 pristine videos; the “Face Manipulation Methods” passage reports 4,000 fake videos. Together these support a total of 5,000 videos, but only 4,000 were generated by the four methods. The paper describes a visual forgery dataset, but our copy does not establish that it was already widely used. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • FaceForensics++ is a widely used visual-only deepfake dataset containing 5000 videos generated using four distinct deepfake generation methods.

    “FaceForensics++ [51] is a widely used visual-only deepfake dataset containing 5000 videos generated using four distinct deepfake generation methods.”

    From Deepfake Media Forensics: Status and Future Challenges (2025) · cites this paper as [51]

    Section 3 (page not available) identifies four face-manipulation methods and 1,000 pristine videos; the Face Manipulation Methods passage reports 4,000 fake videos. That supports 5,000 videos in total, but not the claim that all 5,000 were generated by the four methods. The passages describe visual facial manipulations but do not establish how widely the dataset is used. (LLM, conf=0.87)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Early deepfake detection methods primarily relied on conventional CNNs to identify low-level visual inconsistencies and blending artifacts in manipulated frames.

    “Early deepfake detection methods primarily relied on conventional CNNs to identify low-level visual inconsistencies and blending artifacts in manipulated frames.”

    From Cross-dataset video deepfake detection using Transformer and CNN architectures (2026) · cites this paper as [10]

    The Face Manipulation Methods section says some detectors use deep networks to capture subtle low- or high-level inconsistencies, supporting that part of the claim. It does not say early deepfake detectors primarily used conventional CNNs or specifically targeted blending artifacts; its broader multimedia-forensics discussion instead describes early methods as handcrafted-feature approaches and CNN-based work as more recent. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • FaceForensics++ (FF++) is the most widely used training dataset, containing over 1,000 videos manipulated with four different techniques: DeepFakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap, and NeuralTextures.

    “In the visual domain, FaceForensics++ (FF++) [36] is the most widely used training dataset, containing over 1,000 videos manipulated with four different techniques: DeepFakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap, and NeuralTextures.”

    From Deepfake detection across image, video, and audio: a comprehensive survey with empirical evaluation of generalization and robustness (2026) · cites this paper as [36]

    The Abstract identifies FaceForensics++ as a dataset for training detectors and names all four manipulation methods. The Face Manipulation Methods section reports 4,000 fake videos, supporting “over 1,000.” Our copy does not establish that it is the most widely used training dataset. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. [31]31. A. Gironi, Marco Fontani, Tiziano Bianchi, Alessandro Piva, and Mauro Barni. A video forensic technique for detection frame deletion and insertion. In IEEE International Con- ference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, pages 6226-6230, 2014. 3
  2. [37]37. Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, and Jaakko Lehtinen. Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stabil- ity, and Variation. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2018. 3
  3. [49]49. Patrick Pérez, Michel Gangnet, and Andrew Blake. Pois- son image editing. ACM Transactions on graphics (TOG), 22(3):313-318, 2003. 4, 14
  4. [57]57. Justus Thies, Michael Zollhöfer, and Matthias Nießner. De- ferred neural rendering: Image synthesis using neural tex- tures. ACM Transactions on Graphics 2019 (TOG), 2019. 1, 2, 3, 4, 14
  5. [60]60. Justus Thies, Michael Zollhöfer, Marc Stamminger, Chris- tian Theobalt, and Matthias Nießner. FaceVR: Real-Time Gaze-Aware Facial Reenactment in Virtual Reality. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 2018. 3
  6. [65]65. Kaipeng Zhang, Zhanpeng Zhang, Zhifeng Li, and Yu Qiao. Joint face detection and alignment using multitask cascaded convolutional networks. IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 23(10):1499-1503, Oct 2016. 14

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Rossler, A., Cozzolino, D., Verdoliva, L., Riess, C., Thies, J., & Niessner, M.
Affiliations
  • University of Naples Federico II (IT)
  • Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (DE)
  • Technical University of Munich (DE)
Venue
2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2019-10
Pages
1-11
OpenAlex
W2912336782
Cited by
3,314
References
67
Citations by year
2026: 588 · 2025: 735 · 2024: 579 · 2023: 474 · 2022: 406 · 2021: 310 · 2020: 188 · 2019: 33 · 2018: 1
FWCI
76.37
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Digital Media Forensic Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Mathematics › Statistics and Probability › Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection
Keywords
face manipulation detection, deepfakes, FaceForensics++, benchmark dataset, Face2Face, image compression robustness, human observer comparison, domain knowledge, fake news

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