APT: Anchor-aligned Perturbations for Tamper Localization in Fully Regenerated Images

Verifying image authenticity is increasingly difficult, posing serious risks across journalism, law enforcement, and political domains. Most existing forensic methods rely on high-level visual artifacts and treat frame detection as a simple binary task. To address this, we propose SegWave, a hybrid framework that jointly leverages spatial and frequency-domain cues for image tampering detection. SegWave integrates a transformer-based architecture with the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to capture localized, multi-scale frequency inconsistencies indicative of manipulation. To further improve localization effectiveness, we introduce an Adaptive Sub-band Attention module (ASA) that dynamically highlights the informative high-frequency wavelet components. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that SegWave consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tampering detection methods in challenging evaluation settings.

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

Localizing document tampering is extremely challenging, as manipulations are crafted to appear visually consistent and often leave only subtle traces that are nearly invisible to the human eye. In prior work, evaluation has been largely dominated by synthetic benchmarks that closely match the training distribution, and methods have shown steady progress under this setting. However, these gains often translate poorly to human-made forgeries and to cross-domain evaluation, where both the source documents and the tampering pipeline can change, leading to a distribution shift. In addition, since the introduction of the Frequency Perception Head for the discrete cosine transform (DCT) modality, it has become a standard choice, and subsequent work has largely focused on downstream modules and fusion strategies rather than revisiting the backbone itself. To help close this gap in cross-domain performance and improve the DCT backbone design, we propose \textbf{DiffNet}, a relatively simple yet effective RGB--DCT early-fusion architecture driven by two key design choices. First, to ensure that the decoder aggregates multi-scale inconsistency evidence rather than operating on raw, content-heavy activations, we apply a lightweight multi-level discrepancy transformation at the output of each backbone stage, replacing features with magnitude-only responses to learned zero-sum filters. Second, we design an efficient DCT-domain backbone that relies on a lightweight frequency-index-aware DCT--quantization joint embedding. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on cross-domain and human-made document tampering localization, outperforming prior methods by around 30%, with up to $7\times$ higher throughput than the previous best model.