Deepfake Video Detection: A Comprehensive Review

Deepfake technology, driven by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, presents significant political, social, and economic threats. This review consolidates insights from over 30 scholarly contributions on deepfake detection techniques, datasets, evaluation metrics, and ongoing challenges. We examine both traditional methods and modern deep learning strategies, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), transformers, multimodal architectures, and ensemble frameworks. Key benchmark datasets—DFDC, FaceForensics++, and Deepfake-Eval-2024—are comparatively analyzed. Performance metrics such as accuracy, AUC, F1-score, and Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC), along with adversarial robustness, are critically assessed. Identified limitations include poor cross-domain generalization, suboptimal real-time performance, and dataset bias. The review proposes future directions including adaptive detection models, enhanced multimodal fusion, model interpretability, and the need for unified global standards in forensic validation.