Level Up the Deepfake Detection: a Method to Effectively Discriminate Images Generated by GAN Architectures and Diffusion Models

Abstract: The image deepfake detection task has been greatly addressed by the scientific community to discriminate real images from those generated by AI models: a binary classification task. In this work, the deepfake detection and recognition task was investigated by collecting a dedicated dataset of pristine images and fake ones generated by 9 different Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architectures and by 4 additional Diffusion Models (DM). A hierarchical multi-level approach was then introduced to solve three different deepfake detection and recognition tasks: (i) Real Vs AI generated; (ii) GANs Vs DMs; (iii) AI specific architecture recognition. Experimental results demonstrated, in each case, more than 97% classification accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.