DeepRhythm: Exposing DeepFakes with Attentional Visual Heartbeat Rhythms

As the GAN-based face image and video generation techniques, widely known as DeepFakes, have become more and more matured and realistic, the need for an effective DeepFakes detector has become imperative. Motivated by the fact that remote visualphotoplethysmography (PPG) is made possible by monitoring the minuscule periodic changes of skin color due to blood pumping through the face, we conjecture that normal heartbeat rhythms found in the real face videos will be diminished or even disrupted entirely in a DeepFake video, making it a powerful indicator for detecting DeepFakes. In this work, we show that our conjecture holds true and the proposed method indeed can very effectively exposeDeepFakes by monitoring the heartbeat rhythms, which is termedasDeepRhythm. DeepRhythm utilizes dual-spatial-temporal attention to adapt to dynamically changing face and fake types. Extensive experiments on FaceForensics++ and DFDC-preview datasets have demonstrated not only the effectiveness of our proposed method, but also how it can generalize over different datasets with various DeepFakes generation techniques and multifarious challenging degradations.