Visual Realism Assessment for Face-swap Videos

Abstract: Deep-learning based face-swap videos, also known as deep fakes, are becoming more and more realistic and deceiving. The malicious usage of these face-swap videos has caused wide concerns. The research community has been focusing on the automatic detection of these fake videos, but the assessment of their visual realism, as perceived by human eyes, is still an unexplored dimension. Visual realism assessment, or VRA, is essential for assessing the potential impact that may be brought by a specific face-swap video, and it is also important as a quality assessment metric to compare different face-swap methods. In this paper, we make a small step towards this new VRA direction by building a benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of different automatic VRA models, which range from using traditional hand-crafted features to different kinds of deep-learning features. The evaluations are based on a recent competition dataset named DFGC 2022, which contains 1400 diverse face-swap videos that are annotated with Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) on visual realism. Comprehensive experiment results using 11 models and 3 protocols are shown and discussed. We demonstrate the feasibility of devising effective VRA models for assessing face-swap videos and methods. The particular usefulness of existing deepfake detection features for VRA is also noted. The code can be found at https://github.com/XianyunSun/VRA.git.