Gotcha: Real-Time Video Deepfake Detection via Challenge-Response

With the rise of AI-enabled Real-Time Deepfakes (RTDFs), the integrity of online video interactions has become a growing concern. RTDFs have now made it feasible to replace an imposter's face with their victim in live video interactions. Such advancement in deepfakes also coaxes detection to rise to the same standard. However, existing deepfake detection techniques are asynchronous and hence ill-suited for RTDFs. To bridge this gap, we propose a challenge-response approach that establishes authenticity in live settings. We focus on talking-head style video interaction and present a taxonomy of challenges that specifically target inherent limitations of RTDF generation pipelines. We evaluate representative examples from the taxonomy by collecting a unique dataset comprising eight challenges, which consistently and visibly degrades the quality of state-of-the-art deepfake generators. These results are corroborated both by humans and a new automated scoring function, leading to 88.6\% and 73.2% AUC, respectively. The findings underscore the promising potential of challenge-response systems for explainable and scalable real-time deepfake detection in practical scenarios.