Top Deepfake Detection Researchers in AI (2026)

Senior Principal Scientist / Director, Trusted Media Intelligence lab, Adobe Research · Professor of AI; founder-director of DECaDE, University of Surrey (CVSSP / DECaDE)

PhD · University of Bath

Technical leadership of Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative and the C2PA provenance standard; EKILA attribution

Co-founded Adobe's Content Authenticity Initiative (2019) and provides core technical leadership to the C2PA cross-industry media-provenance standard. His EKILA work pairs robust visual attribution with C2PA to trace generative-art provenance.

Professor, Audio Security and Privacy, EURECOM

Co-founder and lead organizer of the ASVspoof challenge series

Among the founders of the ASVspoof and VoicePrivacy community initiatives, leading EURECOM's audio security group whose work on synthetic-speech and replay-attack detection underpins much of the modern anti-spoofing field.

Professor, UC Berkeley · Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer, GetReal Security

PhD · University of Pennsylvania — PhD in Computer Science (1997), advised by Eero Simoncelli/David Brainard-era vision group; postdoc at MIT with Ted Adelson

Pioneer of digital image forensics and deepfake detection; UC Berkeley professor, GetReal Security co-founder

The founding figure of modern digital image forensics, with two decades of work on detecting manipulated and AI-generated media. Co-founder of GetReal Security and one of the most-quoted experts on deepfakes and authenticity.

Associate Director, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS)

PhD · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Technical University of Catalonia) — PhD (2009), Image Processing Group; dissertation 'Human Motion Capture with Scalable Body Models'

Led Meta's AI Red Team and the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC)

Led the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC) at Meta — the largest public deepfake-detection competition and dataset — and works on responsible AI and forensics datasets.

Professor of Speech Technology, University of Eastern Finland

PhD · University of Joensuu

Co-founder of the ASVspoof challenge series and co-author of the t-DCF spoofing-aware evaluation metric

Co-founded the ASVspoof challenge initiative, the field-defining benchmark for speech anti-spoofing, and co-developed the tandem detection cost function (t-DCF) that became the standard metric for jointly evaluating spoofing countermeasures and speaker verification.

SUNY Distinguished Professor & Empire Innovation Professor; Director, Institute for AI and Data Science, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

PhD · Dartmouth College — PhD in Computer Science (2005), advised by Hany Farid

Media forensics / deepfake detection leader at University at Buffalo; built DeepFake-o-Meter

Creator of DeepfakeBench and the public Deepfake-o-meter detection platform; an early pioneer of detecting deepfakes via physiological cues such as eye-blinking.

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Cornell Tech (Cornell University)

PhD · MIT — Advised by William T. Freeman and Antonio Torralba (CSAIL)

Audio-visual self-supervised learning; self-supervised video forensics for deepfake detection

Developed widely cited methods for universal detection of CNN- and diffusion-generated images and for audio-visual forensics at the University of Michigan.

Full Professor, University of Naples Federico II

PhD · University of Naples Federico II — Multimedia/image processing group, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (now leads the GRIP Multimedia Forensics Lab)

Multimedia forensics leader at University of Naples Federico II; synthetic-image / deepfake detection (GRIP lab)

Co-creator of FaceForensics++, the most widely used benchmark for face-manipulation detection, and a leading authority on image/video forensics and GAN-generated-content detection.

Professor, National Institute of Informatics (NII)

PhD · Tokyo Institute of Technology — PhD in Information Processing (2006), Interdisciplinary Graduate School of Science and Engineering (Tokuda/Kobayashi speech synthesis group)

Speech synthesis and audio deepfake / anti-spoofing pioneer at NII Tokyo; co-lead of the ASVspoof challenge

Co-founder of the ASVspoof challenge series, the global standard for audio deepfake and voice-clone (anti-spoofing) detection, and a leader in speech-synthesis research.

Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University

PhD · University of New Mexico — PhD in computer engineering (with Distinction), 2003

Deepfake/media-forensics researcher; recurrent-CNN and two-branch deepfake video detection (ex-USC ISI, now Clemson)

Leading researcher in deepfake detection, biometric anti-spoofing, and multimedia forensics.

Associate Professor, ISPL, Politecnico di Milano

PhD · Politecnico di Milano — Image and Sound Processing Lab (ISPL)

Image/video/audio forensics in the ISPL lab; DARPA MediFor & SemaFor contributor

Associate Professor in the ISPL group at Politecnico di Milano and Associate Editor of IEEE TIFS; co-PI on the DARPA MediFor and SemaFor media-forensics programs, working on image, video and audio (deepfake) forensics.

Research Scientist, Anthropic

PhD · UC Berkeley — Advised by David Wagner (security/adversarial ML)

Adversarial ML and ML-security researcher; creator of the Carlini & Wagner attack and LLM training-data extraction

A leading adversarial-ML researcher whose work probes the robustness of watermarks and deepfake detectors against attack — defining what detection can and cannot withstand.

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor (GRIP group), University of Naples Federico II

PhD · University of Naples Federico II — GRIP (Image Processing Research Group), advised by Luisa Verdoliva

Media forensics and deepfake detection; co-author of FaceForensics++ and ID-Reveal at GRIP, Univ. of Naples

Co-author of FaceForensics++ and a leading researcher on splice/copy-move detection and forensic fingerprints (Noiseprint) of generative models.

Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

PhD · California Institute of Technology — Richard M. Murray

Lead author of SynthID-Text, the first production-scale LLM text watermarking scheme (Nature 2024)

Lead author of the Nature 2024 paper introducing SynthID-Text, a production-ready watermarking scheme that preserves text quality with minimal latency and was deployed and open-sourced by Google DeepMind.

Research Scientist, Microsoft

Co-author of the t-DCF metric and ASVspoof evaluation infrastructure

Co-author of the t-DCF spoofing-aware evaluation metric and a key contributor to the ASVspoof challenge metrics and countermeasure work during his time at EURECOM, now a research scientist at Microsoft (formerly Nuance).

Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University

PhD · Purdue University — PhD in electrical engineering, Purdue University

Director of Purdue's VIPER Lab; leads DARPA SemaFor media-forensics work detecting deepfakes and manipulated media

A long-standing leader in media forensics, central to DARPA's MediFor program for image and video tamper detection.

Associate Professor, Monash University

PhD · Australian National University

FakeBuster deepfake detector and the AV-Deepfake1M challenge/dataset

Associate Professor at Monash University (previously faculty at IIT Ropar) working on affective computing and deepfake detection; co-creator of the FakeBuster tool and the AV-Deepfake1M audio-visual deepfake dataset/challenge.

Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland

PhD · MIT — EECS; co-advised by Muriel Médard and Manolis Kellis

Trustworthy AI at UMD; showed AI-image watermarks/detectors are removable & forgeable. Founder/CSO of RELAI.

Leads research on detecting diffusion-generated images and on the robustness of watermarking and provenance methods at the University of Maryland.

Research Scientist, Meta FAIR (Paris)

PhD · Inria Rennes / Meta FAIR (Univ. of Rennes) — Teddy Furon, Hervé Jégou, Matthijs Douze

First author of Stable Signature (image) and AudioSeal (localized speech watermarking)

Research scientist at Meta FAIR specializing in watermarking for content protection. First author of The Stable Signature (rooting invisible watermarks in latent diffusion models) and AudioSeal (localized watermarking for AI-generated speech).

Professor of CS; Director, Maryland Center for Machine Learning, University of Maryland

PhD · UCLA

Tree-Ring Watermarks — invisible, robust fingerprints embedded in the diffusion sampling process

Senior author of Tree-Ring Watermarks (NeurIPS 2023), which embeds a Fourier-space pattern into the initial diffusion noise so the watermark survives crops, rotations, and color jitter far better than post-hoc methods. A leading voice on watermark robustness and model security.

Senior Research Scientist, Apple (AIML)

PhD · University of Seoul

Lead author of RawNet and the AASIST anti-spoofing architecture; organizer of the SASV challenge

Lead author of the RawNet family and the widely-adopted AASIST spectro-temporal graph-attention anti-spoofing model, and an organizer of the first Spoofing-Aware Speaker Verification (SASV) challenge; previously at Naver Clova and a CMU postdoc, now at Apple.

SVP Research, Pindrop

Leads Pindrop's industrial voice anti-spoofing and audio-deepfake-detection research

Leads Pindrop's Speech Research team on voice biometrics, deepfake detection, and phoneprinting, and previously researched voice-spoofing countermeasures at Idiap; one of the most prominent industrial voices in audio anti-spoofing.

Research Associate, Biometrics Security & Privacy group, Idiap Research Institute

PhD · University of Genoa / National University of Singapore — Computer science (multimedia/video quality) PhD

Idiap researcher on audio-visual deepfake detection and voice/face anti-spoofing; co-author of early deepfake benchmark.

Associate Professor, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University

ASVspoof organizer and co-author of the t-DCF spoofing-aware evaluation metric

A core ASVspoof organizer and co-author of the t-DCF metric, with influential work on speaker embeddings (i-vector / x-vector / xi-vector) and spoofing-aware speaker verification.

MSU Foundation Professor, Michigan State University

PhD · Carnegie Mellon University

Attention-based face manipulation detection (DFFD) and deep face anti-spoofing

MSU Foundation Professor and IEEE/IAPR Fellow leading the Computer Vision Lab; his CVPR 2020 work 'On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation' introduced an attention-based detector and the DFFD database, atop a long line of CVPR/ECCV face anti-spoofing work.

Senior Research Scientist, Head of Biometrics Security & Privacy group, Idiap Research Institute · Professor, School of Criminal Justice, University of Lausanne

PhD · Université de Rennes I (PhD at CNET/France Telecom, 2000) — Signal processing PhD, CNET (France Telecom research center, Rennes)

Heads Biometrics Security & Privacy at Idiap; presentation-attack, morphing & deepfake detection for biometrics.

Leads biometric anti-spoofing and face presentation-attack detection at Idiap, a foundational area for deepfake-resistant authentication.

Lead Research Scientist; Distinguished Engineer; Head of Creative AI Lab, Sony AI / Sony Group

Senior author of SilentCipher, a psychoacoustically-imperceptible deep audio watermarking method

Leads music and sound research at Sony AI and Sony Group's Creative AI Lab. Senior author of SilentCipher (Interspeech 2024), the first deep audio-watermarking model to use psychoacoustic-model thresholding for imperceptible, robust watermarks.

Assistant Professor, University of South Florida (Bellini College)

PhD · University of Wisconsin-Madison — Yong Jae Lee

Showed a frozen CLIP feature space generalizes across generative models for fake-image detection

Lead author of 'Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors' (CVPR 2023), which showed that classifying real vs. fake in a frozen CLIP feature space generalizes far better across unseen GAN and diffusion generators. PhD at UW-Madison under Yong Jae Lee; joined USF faculty in 2025.

Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering, University of North Texas

PhD · University of Cagliari — Electrical & Computer Engineering (PhD 2010; pattern recognition / adaptive biometrics)

UNT professor leading Visual Computing & Biometric Security Lab; fairness/bias in deepfake detection and biometrics.

Senior Researcher / Group Head, Multimedia Security, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

PhD · FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Heads the Multimedia Security group at FAU; image forensics

Head of the Multimedia Security group within FAU's IT Security Infrastructures Lab and one of Germany's leading image-forensics experts; works on detecting manipulated images and deepfakes, including funded projects on deepfake detection.

Full Professor, Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP)

PhD · University of Campinas (UNICAMP)

Founding/heading the Recod.ai lab; digital image & multimedia forensics

IEEE Fellow and Full Professor of AI and Digital Forensics at UNICAMP, where he heads the Recod.ai lab; a long-standing leader in digital image/video forensics and a former Director of UNICAMP's Institute of Computing.

Assistant Professor, TCG CREST (Institute for Advancing Intelligence)

PhD · Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur — Dept. of Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering (speech processing, PhD 2015)

Speech anti-spoofing researcher and ASVspoof challenge co-organizer; audio deepfake / speaker-verification security.

Co-organizer of ASVspoof and a leader in audio anti-spoofing and speaker verification.

Associate Professor, ECE, Drexel University

PhD · University of Maryland, College Park

Constrained CNN (MISLnet) for universal image manipulation detection

Director of the Multimedia and Information Security Lab (MISL) at Drexel; his constrained-convolution CNN (MISLnet) is a widely used general-purpose image/video forensics detector, recently extended to identifying fingerprints of AI-generated video.

Research Scientist, CSIRO Data61

PhD · Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) — Simon S. Woo (DASH Lab)

CSIRO Data61 research scientist on deepfake detection and generative-media forensics; 2025 AU AI Rising Star

Associate Professor, Digital Security Department, EURECOM

PhD · University of Rome Tor Vergata

Co-author of the t-DCF metric and the end-to-end RawNet2 anti-spoofing model

Co-developed the t-DCF evaluation metric and led the application of RawNet2 to end-to-end raw-waveform anti-spoofing, advancing deepfake-speech detection and voice-biometric trustworthiness at EURECOM.

Assistant Professor of CS; head of the SPY Lab, ETH Zurich

PhD · Stanford University — Dan Boneh

Adversarial-security research exposing weaknesses in generative-AI watermarks and detectors

Leads the SPY Lab at ETH Zurich studying the adversarial behavior of ML systems. His group has published attacks that remove or evade generative-AI watermarks, making him a leading skeptic on watermark robustness.

Full Professor, DEIB, Politecnico di Milano

PhD · Politecnico di Milano

Leads the Image and Sound Processing Group (ISPG); video forensics & deepfake detection

Full Professor of Telecommunications at Politecnico di Milano who coordinates the Image and Sound Processing Group; a long-standing multimedia-forensics researcher (DARPA MediFor/SemaFor) with 150+ publications spanning video forensics and synthetic-media detection.

Project Associate Professor, National Institute of Informatics (Yamagishi Lab)

PhD · SOKENDAI / National Institute of Informatics — Yamagishi Lab

ASVspoof organizer and pioneer of vocoder-generated training data for speech spoofing countermeasures

An organizing-team member of the ASVspoof challenges since 2019 whose work showed neural vocoders can efficiently synthesize spoofed training data, substantially improving the generalization of speech-deepfake countermeasures.

Tenured Associate Professor, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Directs the SCLBD lab behind DeepfakeBench and BackdoorBench

Tenured Associate Professor at CUHK-Shenzhen (ex-Tencent AI Lab) who directs the Secure Computing Lab of Big Data (SCLBD); his group produced DeepfakeBench and BackdoorBench, two widely used benchmarks for deepfake detection and backdoor learning.

PhD Candidate, University of Naples Federico II

PhD · University of Naples Federico II — Luisa Verdoliva (GRIP-UNINA)

Lead author of an early study on the forensic traces left by diffusion models

PhD candidate in Luisa Verdoliva's GRIP lab. Lead author of 'On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models' (ICASSP 2023), among the first to characterize the forensic fingerprints of diffusion models and test detector generalization.

PhD Candidate, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

UB PhD (Lyu lab); first author on fairness/generalization in deepfake detection and AI-generated image detection

Known for Glaze / DeepfakeBench contributions. Active first-author on deepfake detection generalization papers from Lyu's lab

Associate Professor, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)

PhD · Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

UCAS professor; co-author of the Celeb-DF deepfake forensics dataset; video/image coding research

Known for Multi-attentional face forgery detection. Frequent first-author on attention-based detector architectures

PhD Student, Beijing Jiaotong University

PhD · Beijing Jiaotong University — Yao Zhao

Proposed Neighboring Pixel Relationships (NPR) as a universal up-sampling artifact for generalizable detection

PhD student at Beijing Jiaotong University (advisor Yao Zhao). Lead author of the NPR method (CVPR 2024), which models Neighboring Pixel Relationships as a generalized up-sampling artifact, achieving state-of-the-art generalizable detection across 28 generative models.

PhD Student, Carnegie Mellon University

PhD · Carnegie Mellon University — Jun-Yan Zhu

Lead author of the CVPR 2020 paper showing CNN-generated images carry a common, transferable fingerprint

Lead author of 'CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now' (CVPR 2020), a foundational result showing a detector trained on a single CNN generator generalizes to many others, establishing the transferable-fingerprint paradigm. Advised by Jun-Yan Zhu at CMU.

PhD Student, Nanyang Technological University (S-Lab / MMLab@NTU)

NTU S-Lab; co-proposed Sequential DeepFake Manipulation detection (Seq-DeepFake / SeqFakeFormer)

Known for Recent CVPR deepfake detection work. Recent first-author work on robust deepfake detection benchmarks

PhD Student, Peking University

PhD · Peking University — Li Yuan, Fanyang Mo

First author of DeepfakeBench (NeurIPS 2023)

PhD student at Peking University (advised by Li Yuan and Fanyang Mo) and first author of DeepfakeBench, the NeurIPS 2023 benchmark that has become a standard evaluation platform for deepfake detection.