Deepfakes are images and videos which combine mixed source material to produce a synthetic result. They are the latest in a long line of still image and video manipulation techniques and their ability to pass as convincing realities is outpacing the progress of tools to spot them effectively.
The use of deepfakes can range from the trivial and amusing to the outright malicious and disturbing - including the erasure from official photographs of political figures now considered undesirable by a new regime, or the superimposition of celebrity faces into often highly explicit sexual imagery - so methods to better detect them are increasingly sought after, with the latest techniques often based on networks trained using pairs of original and synthesised images.
The new method, devised by scientists at the University of Tokyo, takes a different approach, using novel synthesised images - known as 'self-blended images' - to improve the algorithm's detection rate...