Herd Mentality in Augmentation -- Not a Good Idea! A Robust Multi-stage Approach towards Deepfake Detection

The rapid increase in deepfake technology has raised significant concerns about digital media integrity. Detecting deepfakes is crucial for safeguarding digital media. However, most standard image classifiers fail to distinguish between fake and real faces. Our analysis reveals that this failure is due to the model's inability to explicitly focus on the artefacts typically in deepfakes. We propose an enhanced architecture based on the GenConViT model, which incorporates weighted loss and update augmentation techniques and includes masked eye pretraining. This proposed model improves the F1 score by 1.71% and the accuracy by 4.34% on the Celeb-DF v2 dataset. The source code for our model is available at https://github.com/Monu-Khicher-1/multi-stage-learning