The rise of AI-generated synthetic media, or deepfakes, has introduced unprecedented opportunities and challenges across various fields, including entertainment, cybersecurity, and digital communication. Using advanced frameworks such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), deepfakes are capable of producing highly realistic yet fabricated content, while these advancements enable creative and innovative applications, they also pose severe ethical, social, and security risks due to their potential misuse. The proliferation of deepfakes has triggered phenomena like “Impostor Bias”, a growing skepticism toward the authenticity of multimedia content, further complicating trust in digital interactions. This paper is mainly based on the description of a research project called FF4ALL (FF4ALL-Detection of Deep Fake Media and Life-Long Media Authentication) for the detection and authentication of deepfakes, focusing on areas such as forensic attribution, passive and active authentication, and detection in real-world scenarios. By exploring both the strengths and limitations of current methodologies, we highlight critical research gaps and propose directions for future advancements to ensure media integrity and trustworthiness in an era increasingly dominated by synthetic media.

The widespread use of deep learning techniques for creating realistic synthetic media, commonly known as deepfakes, poses a significant threat to individuals, organizations, and society. As the malicious use of these data could lead to unpleasant situations, it is becoming crucial to distinguish between authentic and fake media. Nonetheless, though deepfake generation systems can create convincing images and audio, they may struggle to maintain consistency across different data modalities, such as producing a realistic video sequence where both visual frames and speech are fake and consistent one with the other. Moreover, these systems may not accurately reproduce semantic and timely accurate aspects. All these elements can be exploited to perform a robust detection of fake content. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting deepfake video sequences by leveraging data multimodality. Our method extracts audio-visual features from the input video over time and analyzes them using time-aware neural networks. We exploit both the video and audio modalities to leverage the inconsistencies between and within them, enhancing the final detection performance. The peculiarity of the proposed method is that we never train on multimodal deepfake data, but on disjoint monomodal datasets which contain visual-only or audio-only deepfakes. This frees us from leveraging multimodal datasets during training, which is desirable given their lack in the literature. Moreover, at test time, it allows to evaluate the robustness of our proposed detector on unseen multimodal deepfakes. We test different fusion techniques between data modalities and investigate which one leads to more robust predictions by the developed detectors. Our results indicate that a multimodal approach is more effective than a monomodal one, even if trained on disjoint monomodal datasets.

With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, the generation and counterfeiting of multimedia material has become increasingly simple. Current technology enables the creation of videos where both the visual and audio contents are falsified. While the multimedia forensics community has begun to address this threat by developing fake media detectors. However, the vast majority existing forensic techniques only analyze one modality at a time. This is an important limitation when authenticating manipulated videos, because sophisticated forgeries may be difficult to detect without exploiting cross-modal inconsistencies (e.g. across the audio and visual tracks). One important reason for the lack of multimodal detectors is a similar lack of research datasets containing multimodal forgeries. Existing datasets typically contain only one falsified modality, such as deepfaked videos with authentic audio tracks, or synthetic audio with no associated video. Currently, datasets are needed that can be used to develop, train, and test these forensic algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new audio-visual deepfake dataset containing multimodal video forgeries. We present a general pipeline for synthesizing deepfake speech content from a given video, facilitating the creation of counterfeit multimodal material. The proposed method uses Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) techniques to achieve realistic speech tracks. We use this pipeline to generate and release TIMIT-TTS, a synthetic speech dataset containing the most cutting-edge methods in the TTS field. This can be used as a standalone audio dataset, or combined with DeepfakeTIMIT and VidTIMIT video datasets to perform multimodal research. Finally, we present numerous experiments to benchmark the proposed dataset in both monomodal (i.e. audio) and multimodal (i.e., audio and video) conditions. This highlights the need for multimodal forensic detectors and more multimodal deepfake data.

Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision have spawned a new class of media forgeries known as deepfakes, which typically consist of artificially generated human faces or voices. The creation and distribution of deepfakes raise many legal and ethical concerns. As a result, the ability to distinguish between deepfakes and authentic media is vital. While deepfakes can create plausible video and audio, it may be challenging for them to to generate content that is consistent in terms of high-level semantic features, such as emotions. Unnatural displays of emotion, measured by features such as valence and arousal, can provide significant evidence that a video has been synthesized. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting deepfakes of a human speaker using the emotion predicted from the speaker’s face and voice. The proposed technique leverages Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks that predict emotion from audio and video Low-Level Descriptors (LLDs). Predicted emotion in time is used to classify videos as authentic or deepfakes through an additional supervised classifier.

Of all the characteristics of a violin, those that concern its shape are probably the most important ones, as the violin maker has complete control over them. Contemporary violin making, however, is still based more on tradition than understanding, and a definitive scientific study of the specific relations that exist between shape and vibrational properties is yet to come and sorely missed. In this article, using standard statistical learning tools, we show that the modal frequencies of violin tops can, in fact, be predicted from geometric parameters, and that artificial intelligence can be successfully applied to traditional violin making. We also study how modal frequencies vary with the thicknesses of the plate (a process often referred to as plate tuning) and discuss the complexity of this dependency. Finally, we propose a predictive tool for plate tuning, which takes into account material and geometric parameters.