Distinguishing Between Natural and GAN-Generated Face Images by Combining Global and Local Features

With the development of face image synthesis and generation technology based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), it has become a research hotspot to determine whether a given face image is natural or generated. However, the generalization capability of the existing algorithms is still to be improved. Therefore, this paper proposes a general algorithm. To do so, firstly, the learning on important local areas, containing many face key-points, is strengthened by combining the global and local features. Secondly, metric learning based on the ArcFace loss is applied to extract common and discriminative features. Finally, the extracted features are fed into the classification module to detect GAN-generated faces. The experiments are conducted on two publicly available natural datasets (CelebA and FFHQ) and seven GAN-generated datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a better generalization performance with an average detection accuracy over 0.99 than the state-of-the-art algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is robust against additional attacks, such as Gaussian blur, and Gaussian noise addition.