Preserving authenticity: transfer learning methods for detecting and verifying facial image manipulation

Abstract

Facial retouching in supporting documents can have adverse effects, undermining the credibility and authenticity of the information presented. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation into the classification of retouched face images using a fine-tuned pre-trained VGG16 model. We explore the impact of different train-test split strategies on the performance of the model and also evaluate the effectiveness of two distinct optimizers. The proposed fine-tuned VGG16 model with “ImageNet” weight achieves a training accuracy of 99.34 % and a validation accuracy of 97.91 % over 30 epochs on the ND-IIITD retouched faces dataset. The VGG16_Adam model gives a maximum classification accuracy of 96.34 % for retouched faces and an overall accuracy of 98.08 %. The experimental results show that the 50 % - 25 % train-test split ratio outperforms other split ratios mentioned in the paper. The demonstrated work shows that using a Transfer Learning approach reduces computational complexity and training time, with a max. training duration of 39.34 min for the proposed model.