DeepLayer-ID: A Lightweight Multi-Domain Forensic Framework for Real-Time Deepfake Detection in Resource-Constrained UAV Sensor Platforms
Nayef Hmoud Alshammari, Sami Aziz Alshammari · Sensors · 2026
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imaging systems are increasingly deployed in surveillance, infrastructure monitoring, and smart-city applications, where the integrity of captured visual data is critical. Recent advances in generative models enable highly realistic deepfake manipulations that can compromise aerial sensor streams, particularly under real-world degradations such as motion blur, sensor noise, and compression artifacts. This paper introduces DeepLayer-ID, a degradation-aware multi-domain forensic framework specifically designed for UAV sensing environments. The proposed architecture decomposes forensic evidence into complementary spatial, frequency, and residual domains. A discrete wavelet transform module captures sub-band energy inconsistencies, while high-pass residual filtering isolates sensor pattern anomalies. A lightweight transformer-based fusion mechanism adaptively integrates cross-domain representations to enhance robustness under heterogeneous acquisition conditions. To emulate operational UAV pipelines, we construct a balanced dataset of 1096 aerial frames derived from the VisDrone2019-DET validation subset, incorporating synthetic manipulations and physics-consistent degradations. The experimental results show that DeepLayer-ID achieves 97.8% accuracy and 0.991 AUC, outperforming ResNet-50 (90.9%, 0.942 AUC), XceptionNet (92.4%, 0.957 AUC), and Noiseprint CNN (93.1%, 0.964 AUC). Notably, the model maintains real-time feasibility, with only 5.4 M parameters and 9.8 ms inference latency. These findings demonstrate that structured multi-domain signal decomposition combined with attention-guided fusion provides a robust and computationally efficient solution for deepfake detection in degraded UAV sensing systems.