  The rapid progress in synthetic image generation and manipulation has now
come to a point where it raises significant concerns for the implications
towards society. At best, this leads to a loss of trust in digital content, but
could potentially cause further harm by spreading false information or fake
news. This paper examines the realism of state-of-the-art image manipulations,
and how difficult it is to detect them, either automatically or by humans. To
standardize the evaluation of detection methods, we propose an automated
benchmark for facial manipulation detection. In particular, the benchmark is
based on DeepFakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap and NeuralTextures as prominent
representatives for facial manipulations at random compression level and size.
The benchmark is publicly available and contains a hidden test set as well as a
database of over 1.8 million manipulated images. This dataset is over an order
of magnitude larger than comparable, publicly available, forgery datasets.
Based on this data, we performed a thorough analysis of data-driven forgery
detectors. We show that the use of additional domainspecific knowledge improves
forgery detection to unprecedented accuracy, even in the presence of strong
compression, and clearly outperforms human observers.
