Spatio-Temporal Catcher: a Self-Supervised Transformer for Deepfake Video Detection

As deepfake technology has become increasingly sophisticated and accessible, making it easier for individuals with malicious intent to create convincing fake content, which has raised considerable concern in the multimedia and computer vision community. Despite significant advances in deepfake video detection, most existing methods mainly focused on model architecture and training processes with little focus on data perspectives. In this paper, we argue that data quality has become the main bottleneck of current research. To be specific, in the pre-training phase, the domain shift between pre-training and target datasets may lead to poor generalization ability. Meanwhile, in the training phase, the low fidelity of the existing datasets leads to detectors relying on specific low-level visual artifacts or inconsistency. To overcome the shortcomings, (1). In the pre-training phase, pre-train our model on high-quality facial videos by utilizing data-efficient reconstruction-based self-supervised learning to solve domain shift. (2). In the training phase, we develop a novel spatio-temporal generator that can synthesize various high-quality "fake" videos in large quantities at a low cost, which enables our model to learn more general spatio-temporal representations in a self-supervised manner. (3). Additinally, to take full advantage of synthetic "fake" videos, we adopt diversity losses at both frame and video levels to explore the diversity of clues in "fake" videos. Our proposed framework is data-efficient and does not require any real-world deepfake videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the generalization capability. Particularly on the most challenging CDF and DFDC datasets, our method outperforms the baselines by 8.88% and 7.73% points, respectively. Our code and Appendix can be found in github.com/llosta/STC.