CustomNet-X: Factorized CNN Design for Real-Time Deepfake Detection
摘要
Deepfakes created with modern generative models raise serious ethical and forensic concerns. Many detectors still depend on large convolutional networks such as ResNet-50 or VGG-19, which are expensive to run and difficult to deploy on embedded devices. We introduce a compact, factorized CNN, CustomNet-X (CustomNet-X), designed to balance accuracy and efficiency. The network combines: (i) depthwise separable convolutions (DSC) to shrink parameters and FLOPs; (ii) hierarchical residual feedback (HRF) to stabilize gradients and preserve multi-scale cues; and (iii) dynamic feature recalibration (DFR) for channel-wise attention to manipulation-sensitive regions. Trained from scratch on DF Wild Cup, CustomNet-X attains 95.6% accuracy and 0.954 F1 with only 0.42M parameters—about \(\mathbf {8.3\times }\) smaller than MobileNetV2. Generalization holds on FaceForensics++ (91.2%) and Celeb-DF (v2) (92.1%), with robustness to common post-processing. Measured throughput is real time: 312 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4070 and 16 FPS on a Jetson Nano. CustomNet-X is therefore a practical, energy-aware choice for edge deployment.