Idemia helping French government line up deepfake defenses

Idemia is at the center of an initiative to develop a deepfake detection toolkit for the government of France.

A post on the biometric digital identity and secure transactions group’s blog outlines its role in the French National Research Agency (ANR)’s project, A Prototype Assessment Toolbox for Forensic Experts (APATE). Launched in response to a 2019 assessment by the French Service National de Police Scientifique (SNPS) that called for deepfake-resistant forensics tools, APATE aims to address the need for reliable and comprehensible deepfake detection methods that can back-up forensics examiners in courtroom scenarios.

“The goal of APATE,” says Idemia’s post, “is to provide forensic experts with criteria and associated tools (scores, statistical distribution, masks applied on images to show areas of manipulation) and knowledge, enabling them to make objective decisions. Ideally, these tools should be adaptable and able to evolve to detect future deepfakes.”

Idemia says APATE will “open the door to legal procedures for deepfake-related crimes,” and help combat negative impacts to socioeconomic and financial stability. The project will foster research in multimodal and cross-modal representation and build expertise in biometric speaker and face recognition to tackle counterfeiting. To facilitate this, Idemia brought together representatives from SNPS, research lab LRE-EPITA, academic institutions École Polytechnique (l’X) and ENS Paris Saclay, plus Idemia’s own executives to form a complementary consortium.

Launched in 2022, APATE is nearing the end of its preliminary stage, and will progress to learning about advanced deepfake detection models.

Following the split of Idemia into three divisions, the first domino has yet to fall – but there has been speculation that Idemia may be looking to offload its digital identity wing for upwards of a billion euros.

Article Topics

A Prototype Assessment Toolbox for Forensic Experts (APATE)  |  biometrics  |  deepfake detection  |  digital identity  |  forensics  |  France  |  IDEMIA