New Finding and Unified Framework for Fake Image Detection

Recently, fake face images generated by generative adversarial network (GAN) have been widely spread in social networks, raising serious social concerns and security risks. To identify the fake images, the top priority is to find what properties make the fake images different from the real images. In this letter, we reveal an important observation about real/fake images, i.e., the GAN generated fake images contain stronger non-local self-similarity than the real images. Motivated by this observation, we propose a simple yet effective non-local attention based fake image detection network, namely NAFID, to distinguish GAN generated fake images from real images. Specifically, we develop a non-local feature extraction (NFE) module to extract the non-local features of the real/fake images, followed by a multi-stage classification module to distinguish the images with the extracted non-local features. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of our NAFID over state-of-the-art (SOTA) face forgery detection methods. More importantly, since the NFE module is independent from classification, we can plug it into any other forgery detection models. The results show that the NFE module can consistently improve the detection accuracy of other models, which verifies the universality of the proposed method.