FakePolisher: Making DeepFakes More Detection-Evasive by Shallow Reconstruction

At this moment, GAN-based image generation methods are still imperfect, whose upsampling design has limitations in leaving some certain artifact patterns in the synthesized image. Such artifact patterns can be easily exploited (by recent methods) for difference detection of real and GAN-synthesized images. However, the existing detection methods put much emphasis on the artifact patterns, which can become futile if such artifact patterns were reduced. Towards reducing the artifacts in the synthesized images, in this paper, we devise a simple yet powerful approach termed FakePolisher that performs shallow reconstruction of fake images through a learned linear dictionary, intending to effectively and efficiently reduce the artifacts introduced during image synthesis. In particular, we first train a dictionary model to capture the patterns of real images. Based on this dictionary, we seek the representation of DeepFake images in a low dimensional subspace through linear projection or sparse coding. Then, we are able to perform shallow reconstruction of the 'fake-free' version of the DeepFake image, which largely reduces the artifact patterns DeepFake introduces. The comprehensive evaluation on 3 state-of-the-art DeepFake detection methods and fake images generated by 16 popular GAN-based fake image generation techniques, demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique. Overall, through reducing artifact patterns, our technique significantly reduces the accuracy of the 3 state-of-the-art fake image detection methods, i.e., 47% on average and up to 93% in the worst case. Our results confirm the limitation of current fake detection methods and calls the attention of DeepFake researchers and practitioners for more general-purpose fake detection techniques.