Abstract
Recently, there have been notable advancements in video editing software. These advancements have allowed novices or those without access to advanced computer technology to generate videos that are visually indistinguishable to the human eye from real ones to the human observer. Therefore, the application of deepfake technology has the potential to expand the scope of identity theft, which poses a significant risk and a formidable challenge to global security. The development of an effective approach for detecting fake videos is necessary. Here, we introduce a novel methodology that employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to effectively differentiate between fake and real images or videos. The proposed methodology presents a novel CNN-GMM architecture in which the fully connected (FC) layer in the CNN is replaced with a customized Gaussian mixture model (GMM) fully connected layer. The GMM layer utilizes a weighted set of Gaussian probability density functions (PDFs) to represent the distribution of data frequencies in both real and fake images. This representation indicates there is a shift in the distribution of the manipulated images due to added noise. The CNN-GMM model demonstrates the ability to accurately identify variations resulting from different types of deepfakes within the probability distribution. It achieves a high level of classification accuracy, reaching up to 100% in training accuracy and up to 96% in validation accuracy. Notwithstanding the ratio of the genuine class to the counterfeit class being 16.6% to 83.4%, the CNN-GMM model exhibited high-performance metrics in terms of recall, accuracy, and F-score when classifying the least genuine class.