Robust and efficient deepfake detection through Gabor-Xception feature fusion
摘要
This paper presents a hybrid deepfake detection framework that fuses handcrafted Gabor filter-based texture features with deep semantic embeddings extracted using a pretrained Xception model enhanced with discriminatively weighted multi-head attention. To improve efficiency and interpretability, Fisher score-based feature selection is applied to retain the most discriminative features for classification. Using stratified cross-validation on the Celeb-DF dataset, the proposed Fisher-selected configuration achieves competitive accuracy of 96.99%, while the full fused representation achieves 97.35%. Cross-dataset evaluations on FaceForensics++ and UADFV show limited zero-shot transfer but demonstrate that performance can be improved through limited target-domain fine-tuning, reaching 91.3% and 86.8% accuracy, respectively, with 10% target data. These results suggest that combining complementary texture and semantic representations provides a compact and adaptable feature space for deepfake detection.