The paper proposes a unified forensics framework that extends traditional binary image manipulation detection to a multiclass setting—distinguishing real, fully synthetic, and tampered images. It adds a segmentation branch for pixel‑level localization of tampered regions, achieving higher classification accuracy and IoU scores compared to recent benchmarks. The authors provide the implementation on GitHub for reproducibility.
By Annalisa Gallina, Marco Fiorucci, Marco Brigo, Federica Battisti, Lamberto Ballan
Raw images inherently suffer from noise due to the stochastic nature of light and sensor hardware imperfections. As real photon counts fall, the ratio of this noise to the signal degrades; consequently, for low-light conditions, robust denoising is especially vital for high-quality results.
The paper introduces TaintedPixels, a proactive video‑protection technique that embeds subtle, structured perturbations into the blue channel of facial regions. These perturbations remain invisible in the original video but become noticeable after black‑box manipulation, thereby flagging deepfakes. Experiments on three off‑the‑shelf manipulation tools and two detectors show that TaintedPixels achieves the highest forgery detection rate while keeping visual distortion minimal (LPIPS = 0.0042), and a human study confirms that protected videos are rarely suspected, whereas forgeries from protected sources are identified as fake far more often than those from unprotected sources.
By Juan Hu, Shaojing Fan, Sanjay Saha, Marc Herrera, Terence Sim
The paper introduces the first systematic robustness benchmark for local invisible image watermarking, evaluating five methods across 55 image transformations that include signal distortions, coordinate misalignments, indirect local edits, and direct watermark edits. Results show that all methods are vulnerable to some transformation, with MaskWM achieving the best payload recovery and localization but at the cost of image quality. The study highlights that robustness varies strongly with transformation type, especially noting that geometric misalignment and generative local edits can completely disrupt payload recovery.
By Kai Yao, Bence Szil\'agyi, Sebesty\'en Kamp, M\'at\'e Po\'or, M\'at\'e Szilveszter, Matyas K. Zsoldos, Marc Juarez
arXiv:2609.27274v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Due to the limited dynamic range of conventional image sensors, captured low dynamic range (LDR) video often suffers from highlight clipping and shadow...
By Tao Zhang, Peixian Su, Xingyu Gao, Yunhao Zou, Yu Lu, Zunjie Zhu, Bolun Zheng, Ying Fu, Chenggang Yan
The paper proposes Artifact-Complementary Expert Fusion (ACEF), a two‑stage framework that enhances AI‑generated image detection by combining two types of reconstruction artifacts—VAE/DDIM and SRGAN—into aligned synthetic negatives. ACEF first builds artifact‑specific experts using LoRA adaptation on a frozen backbone, then fuses their multi‑layer evidence with Layer‑wise Artifact‑Complementary Fusion (LACF) to mitigate conflicts between artifact manifolds. Experiments on 13 benchmarks show that this approach improves generalizability over existing state‑of‑the‑art methods.
By Yiheng Li, Yang Yang, Wenhao Wang, Zichang Tan, Zecheng Lin, Li Gao, Zhen Lei
Due to the limited dynamic range of conventional image sensors, captured low dynamic range (LDR) video often suffers from highlight clipping and shadow detail loss, making high-quality high dynamic ra...
FUSED is a new framework that jointly detects and localizes AI-generated inpainting by combining low-level forensic cues with high-level semantic features through a sparsely-gated Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It predicts both an image-level manipulation score and a pixel-level mask of the inpainted region. On the OpenSDID cross-generator benchmark, FUSED outperforms existing methods, especially on unseen generators, and transfers effectively to the AutoSplice and CocoGlide benchmarks, doubling localization performance.
By Anton Nuzhdin, Marcel Worring, Ivona Najdenkoska
arXiv:2605.16879v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: With the rapid evolution of synthetic media, Image Manipulation Localization (IML) has emerged as a critical component in multimedia forensics for...
By Yunfei Wang, Bo Du, Zhe Yang, Xin Liu, Zhiyu Lin, Tianxin Xu, Ji-Zhe Zhou
The paper benchmarks two strategies for blind image restoration around a fixed image signal processor (ISP): restoring in the RAW domain before the ISP (pre‑ISP) and restoring in the sRGB domain after the ISP (post‑ISP). Across four smartphone groups, two learned ISPs, and three degradation regimes (noise, blur, and combined noise‑blur), the study finds that RAW restoration generally outperforms generic RGB restoration, but RGB models trained with ISP‑aware supervision achieve the best overall performance. The authors emphasize that restoration performance depends heavily on how well the restoration model aligns with the imaging pipeline, and they recommend reporting restoration placement and ISP‑aware supervision as key experimental factors.
By Zihao Lu, Radu Timofte, Marcos V. Conde
arXiv:2608.29243v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Existing diffusion-based enhancement methods provide strong generative capability for low-light image enhancement (LLIE), yet they either rely on paire...
By Wenjie Cai, Yuezhe Yang, Jianyang Xia, Xingbo Dong, Zhe Jin
arXiv:2607. 06615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image forgery detection is a critical task in digital forensics, yet many deep-learning localization approaches are typically GPU-accelerated and computationally heavier than handcrafted screening methods.
By Sujith K Mandala