IEEE Signal Processing Cup 2025

IEEE Signal Processing Cup at IEEE ICASSP 2025
Deepfake Face Detection In The Wild

IEEE ICASSP 2025 Website | 6-11 April 2025 | 2025 SP Cup Official Document

[Sponsored by the MathWorks and IEEE Signal Processing Society]

Introduction

With the surge in advancements in synthetic data generation, deepfakes pose a serious threat due to their potential application in unethical and malicious purposes. This encompasses manipulating public opinion, instigating geopolitical tension, defamation, and identity threats. This year marks a significant election season globally, with more voters than ever in history expected to head to the polls across at least 64 countries. Naturally, deepfakes are of greater concern, as the generated contents in the form of image, video and audio are already widely circulated to gain political advantages. Addressing deepfakes is increasingly challenging due to the continuous development of new generation techniques, creating an 'arms race' between the attacker and the defender, as also mentioned in a recent BBC news report.

Of all potential deepfake content, fake images are more prevalent, as they can be easily generated by non-experts using publicly available tools that require minimal domain knowledge. In recent years, several solutions are proposed to discriminate the fake content from real. However, their effectiveness is questionable due to a lack of generalization, especially in the presence of unseen attacks not represented in the training data. To address this challenge, we present the Deepfake Face Detection In The Wild Competition (DFWild-Cup), which focuses on automatically detecting image deepfakes in real-world settings, with participants assigned to develop systems capable of distinguishing between real and computer-generated images. This DFWild-Cup competition specifically emphasizes the generalization aspects of deepfake detectors by encompassing a wide variety of data generated using diverse generation methods, attack scenarios and source datasets. While a few other machine learning challenges already addressed the deepfake detection, this represents the inaugural challenge solely focused on image deepfake detection in the wild, highlighting its emphasis on diversity, particularly in real-world scenarios. [Read the full Call for Participation for more details.]

Task Description

 The DFWild-Cup is concerned with identifying images whether they are real or fake. The real image can be natural image collected with a camera or snapshots of real videos. Whereas the fake images may be generated with image various image synthesis or forgery techniques or can be snapshot of computer-generated fake videos. The participant will be provided with a set of training and test data. After training the detector with the dedicated training data, the task is to estimate a score of each of the test images. A higher score indicates a real image whereas a lower score indicates a fake image.

Full technical details, dataset(s), evaluation metrics, and all other pertinent information about the competition is located in the "2025 SP Cup Official Document" (above).

Important Dates

• Challenge Announcement/Registration Starts: 11 July 2024
• Release training and validation set: 22 July 2024 [Access the Training and Validation Set]
• Team Registration Deadline: 31 October 2024 (Extended) - Registration Link
• Release of evaluation set: 20 January 2025
• Final Submission Due : 27 January 2025 [Submit Team's Work]
• Announcement of 3 Finalists Teams: 31 January 2025
• Presentation of final results at ICASSP 2025: 6-11 April 2025

Registration and Important Resources

Official SP Cup Team Registration

• All teams MUST be registered through the official competition registration system before the deadline in order to be considered as a participating team. Teams also MUST acknowledge, agree to the SPS Student Terms and Conditions, and meet all eligibility requirements at the time of team registration as well as throughout the competition. The Agreement Form can be found in the Official Terms & Conditions document linked in the top section of this page.
• Register your team for the 2025 SP Cup before the Team Registration Deadline date above and submit work before Final Submission Due date above at the following link: [Register your team HERE]

Finalist Teams

Grand Prize

Team: CUDA - Out of Memory 
National Institute of Technology Karnataka
Supervisor: Deepu Vijayasenan
Students: Aryan Herur, Hemanth Kumar Mogilipalem, M Manvith Prabhu, Surya Abhinai Jayavarapu, Vaibhav Santhosh, Venkata Srinanda Kalik

First Runner-Up

Team: IITH 
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Supervisor: Sumohana Channappayya
Students: Ankit Saha, Donal Loitam, Himanshu Kumar Gupta, Karthik Ravula, Lokesh Badisa, Sai Pradeep Iragavarapu

Second Runner-Up

Team: Straw Hats
BUET - Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Supervisor: Mohammad Saifur Rahman
Tutor: Sheikh Azizul Hakim
Students: Abir Muhtasim, Hafijul Hoque Chowdhury, Mahir Labib Dihan, MD Sadik Hossain Shanto, Md Tanvir Hassan, MD., Roqunuzzaman Sojib, Rakib Ahsan, Riad Ahmed Anonto, Souvik Ghosh

Contacts

Competition Organizers (technical, competition-specific inquiries): MD Sahidulla

SPS Staff (Terms & Conditions, Travel Grants, Prizes): Jaqueline Rash, SPS Membership Program and Events Administrator

SPS Student Services Committee: Angshul Majumdar, Chair

Sponsors

This competition is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and MathWorks: