Deep learning has been evolving recently which allowed it to handle
complex problems like big data, computer vision, and humanlevel
control. One of the deep learning-powered applications recently
emerged is called ”deepfake”. Deepfake algorithms have recently been
a controversial development in Artificial Intelligence, because they use
deep learning to generate fake yet realistic content based on an input
dataset. As a result, many are concerned with the potential risks
in terms of cyber-security as it causes threats to privacy, democracy,
and national security. Multiple techniques were proposed to detect
deepfake videos, however most cannot cope with the variety of the
deepfake generation techniques. Therefore, in this study, we optimize
one of the best existing deepfake detection methods based on Xception
model. In particular, our proposed optimization scheme consists
of a pre-processing phase performing advanced image enhancement
on the videos in hand for highlighting the face features for better feature
extraction as well fake content detection, which is preceded by a
close-up dataset cleansing. Our experiments show that the proposed
pre-processing optimization scheme had a major improvement to the
performance of the Xception Binary Classifier- Inference model.