A Comparative Analysis of Compression and Transfer Learning Techniques in DeepFake Detection Models

DeepFake detection models play a crucial role in ambient intelligence and smart environments, where systems rely on authentic information for accurate decisions. These environments, integrating interconnected IoT devices and AI-driven systems, face significant threats from DeepFakes, potentially leading to compromised trust, erroneous decisions, and security breaches. To mitigate these risks, neural-network-based DeepFake detection models have been developed. However, their substantial computational requirements and long training times hinder deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper investigates compression and transfer learning techniques to reduce the computational demands of training and deploying DeepFake detection models, while preserving performance. Pruning, knowledge distillation, quantization, and adapter modules are explored to enable efficient real-time DeepFake detection. An evaluation was conducted on four benchmark datasets: “SynthBuster”, “140k Real and Fake Faces”, “DeepFake and Real Images”, and “ForenSynths”. It compared compressed models with uncompressed baselines using widely recognized metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, model size, and training time. The results showed that a compressed model at 10% of the original size retained only 56% of the baseline accuracy, but fine-tuning in similar scenarios increased this to nearly 98%. In some cases, the accuracy even surpassed the original’s performance by up to 12%. These findings highlight the feasibility of deploying DeepFake detection models in edge computing scenarios.