arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

From Detection to Localization: A Unified Forensics Framework for Fully Synthetic and Tampered Images

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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Can Tainted Pixels Expose Deepfake Videos?

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
arXiv AI
Sep 16

What Breaks Local Watermarks? A Robustness Benchmark for Local Invisible Image Watermarking

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 Computer Vision
Aug 25

Reduce the Artifacts Bias for More Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection

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