FairForensics: mitigating attribute bias in deepfake detection by integrating texture and attribute features

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Deepfake technology, which involves the synthesis of highly realistic face-swapping images and videos, has garnered significant attention. While this technology has various legitimate applications, its misuse in political manipulation, identity fraud, and misinformation poses serious societal risks. Consequently, effective face forgery detection methods are crucial. However, current detection techniques often overlook fairness concerns, with significant disparities observed across different attributes, such as gender and race. These biases not only undermine the reliability of detection systems but also hinder their applicability in diverse cultural contexts. In this paper, we present a novel face forgery detection method named FairForensics, which extracts attribute and texture features to mitigate such biases while enhancing detection accuracy. The method uses the fairtexture module to extract detailed information about facial textures, such as facial skin, hair color, style and wrinkles, which are indicative of forgeries. In parallel, the fairattribute module is introduced to extract high-level semantic features related to gender, race, and other facial attributes. By comparing facial attributes across different video frames, our method identifies inconsistencies that are typical in forged videos, where the facial features may not align consistently over time. On this basis, we design a spatial-temporal feature fair aggregator that effectively integrates texture and attribute features. The interaction between spatial and temporal attention mechanisms captures long-term dependencies, providing a fair feature representation. The proposed approach not only improves detection accuracy but also reduces the detection disparity across different face attributes, effectively mitigating attribute bias. This work contributes to the development of more accurate and fair face forgery detection systems, offering a promising solution to the societal challenges posed by Deepfake technology.