Deepfake Face Detection: An Ensemble Framework for Generalized Classification in Biometric Verification Systems

Generation methods for deepfake images have advanced rapidly, and deepfake face images pose a critical security for biometric verification systems. Applications that rely on face recognition to grant access to sensitive data need to maintain high accuracy across a wide variety of deepfake generation methods, including novel and developing types that the application has not previously trained on. Current deepfake detection models achieve nearperfect accuracy on benchmark datasets, but do not perform as well on unseen types of deepfakes that were not part of their training dataset. We propose building an ensemble model with multiple base detectors, each trained on different generation model families to maintain high performance across many deepfake generation methods. Using four base models, including two models with the same architecture and training data, we exhaustively test all possible ensemble models. We find that combining similar base models trained on the same deepfake generation family does not improve performance compared to the individual base models. However, combining base models trained on different deepfake generation families leads to significant increases in accuracy and recall. Our ensemble framework provides a flexible and inexpensive solution in the ever-changing landscape of deepfake generation and security.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Zen, Hilary

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gupta, Amar

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162919

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162919