Watch Those Words: Video Falsification Detection Using Word-Conditioned Facial Motion

In today’s era of digital misinformation, we are increasingly faced with new threats posed by video falsification techniques. Such falsifications range from cheapfakes (e.g., lookalikes or audio dubbing) to deepfakes (e.g., sophisticated AI media synthesis methods), which are becoming perceptually indistinguishable from real videos. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-modal semantic forensic approach to discover clues that go beyond detecting discrepancies in visual quality, thereby handling both simpler cheapfakes and visually persuasive deepfakes. In this work, our goal is to verify that the purported person seen in the video is indeed themselves by detecting anomalous facial movements corresponding to the spoken words. We leverage the idea of attribution to learn person-specific biometric patterns that distinguish a given speaker from others. We use interpretable Action Units (AUs) to capture a person’s face and head movement as opposed to deep CNN features, and we are the first to use word-conditioned facial motion analysis. We further demonstrate our method’s effectiveness on a range of fakes not seen in training including those without video manipulation, that were not addressed in prior work.