Digital Image Forensics

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Overview

Digital image forensics asks whether images are authentic, how they were altered, where edits occurred, and sometimes which tool or source produced them. Methods examine noise, frequency, compression, and other pixel-level traces, often combining them with semantic features from deep networks or vision-language models; related work uses watermarks and steganalysis for authentication and hidden-data detection. Current systems increasingly aim to handle diverse images and tasks, including documents, video, and synthetic-media localization, with explainable evidence rather than only a real-or-fake score. A central challenge is generalizing across generators, editing pipelines, image domains, and post-processing, while avoiding misleading benchmark shortcuts and making calibrated claims about authenticity.

Latest papers

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113 papers10 papers in the last four weeks, down 33% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Apr 11, 2026

Semantic Manipulation Localization

Image Manipulation Localization (IML) aims to identify edited regions in an image. However, with the increasing use of modern image editing and generative models, many manipulations no longer exhibit obvious low-level artifacts. Instead, they often involve subtle but meaning-altering edits to an object's attributes, state, or relationships while remaining highly consistent with the surrounding content. This makes conventional IML methods less effective because they mainly rely on artifact detection rather than semantic sensitivity. To address this issue, we introduce Semantic Manipulation Localization (SML), a new task that focuses on localizing subtle semantic edits that significantly change image interpretation. We further construct a dedicated fine-grained benchmark for SML using a semantics-driven manipulation pipeline with pixel-level annotations. Based on this task, we propose TRACE (Targeted Reasoning of Attributed Cognitive Edits), an end-to-end framework that models semantic sensitivity through three progressively coupled components: semantic anchoring, semantic perturbation sensing, and semantic-constrained reasoning. Specifically, TRACE first identifies semantically meaningful regions that support image understanding, then injects perturbation-sensitive frequency cues to capture subtle edits under strong visual consistency, and finally verifies candidate regions through joint reasoning over semantic content and semantic scope. Extensive experiments show that TRACE consistently outperforms existing IML methods on our benchmark and produces more complete, compact, and semantically coherent localization results. These results demonstrate the necessity of moving beyond artifact-based localization and provide a new direction for image forensics in complex semantic editing scenarios.

Zhenshan Tan, Chenhan Lu, Yuxiang Huang +6

Engineering Research Center of Digital Forensics, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China · College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, and KOKONI3D, Moxin (Hangzhou) Technology Company Ltd., Hangzhou 310027, China

Image Forgery LocalizationDigital Image Forensics
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Apr 9, 2026

SciFigDetect: A Benchmark for AI-Generated Scientific Figure Detection

Modern multimodal generators can now produce scientific figures at near-publishable quality, creating a new challenge for visual forensics and research integrity. Unlike conventional AI-generated natural images, scientific figures are structured, text-dense, and tightly aligned with scholarly semantics, making them a distinct and difficult detection target. However, existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks and methods are almost entirely developed for open-domain imagery, leaving this setting largely unexplored. We present the first benchmark for AI-generated scientific figure detection. To construct it, we develop an agent-based data pipeline that retrieves licensed source papers, performs multimodal understanding of paper text and figures, builds structured prompts, synthesizes candidate figures, and filters them through a review-driven refinement loop. The resulting benchmark covers multiple figure categories, multiple generation sources and aligned real--synthetic pairs. We benchmark representative detectors under zero-shot, cross-generator, and degraded-image settings. Results show that current methods fail dramatically in zero-shot transfer, exhibit strong generator-specific overfitting, and remain fragile under common post-processing corruptions. These findings reveal a substantial gap between existing AIGI detection capabilities and the emerging distribution of high-quality scientific figures. We hope this benchmark can serve as a foundation for future research on robust and generalizable scientific-figure forensics. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Joyce-yoyo/SciFigDetect.

You Hu, Chenzhuo Zhao, Changfa Mo +2

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Independent Researcher, Beijing, China · University of Oulu, Oulu, FINLAND

AI-Generated Image DetectionDigital Image ForensicsSynthetic Benchmark Generation
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Apr 8, 2026

SurFITR: A Dataset for Surveillance Image Forgery Detection and Localisation

We present the Surveillance Forgery Image Test Range (SurFITR), a dataset for surveillance-style image forgery detection and localisation, in response to recent advances in open-access image generation models that raise concerns about falsifying visual evidence. Existing forgery models, trained on datasets with full-image synthesis or large manipulated regions in object-centric images, struggle to generalise to surveillance scenarios. This is because tampering in surveillance imagery is typically localised and subtle, occurring in scenes with varied viewpoints, small or occluded subjects, and lower visual quality. To address this gap, SurFITR provides a large collection of forensically valuable imagery generated via a multimodal LLM-powered pipeline, enabling semantically aware, fine-grained editing across diverse surveillance scenes. It contains over 137k tampered images with varying resolutions and edit types, generated using multiple image editing models. Extensive experiments show that existing detectors degrade significantly on SurFITR, while training on SurFITR yields substantial improvements in both in-domain and cross-domain performance. SurFITR is publicly available on GitHub.

Qizhou Wang, Guansong Pang, Christopher Leckie

The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia · Singapore Management University, Singapore

Image Forgery DetectionDigital Image ForensicsImage Forgery Localization
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Apr 3, 2026

DocShield: Towards AI Document Safety via Evidence-Grounded Agentic Reasoning

The rapid progress of generative AI has enabled increasingly realistic text-centric image forgeries, posing major challenges to document safety. Existing forensic methods mainly rely on visual cues and lack evidence-based reasoning to reveal subtle text manipulations. Detection, localization, and explanation are often treated as isolated tasks, limiting reliability and interpretability. To tackle these challenges, we propose DocShield, the first unified framework formulating text-centric forgery analysis as a visual-logical co-reasoning problem. At its core, a novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism enables implicit agentic reasoning, iteratively cross-validating visual anomalies with textual semantics to produce consistent, evidence-grounded forensic analysis. We further introduce a Weighted Multi-Task Reward for GRPO-based optimization, aligning reasoning structure, spatial evidence, and authenticity prediction. Complementing the framework, we construct RealText-V1, a multilingual dataset of document-like text images with pixel-level manipulation masks and expert-level textual explanations. Extensive experiments show DocShield significantly outperforms existing methods, improving macro-average F1 by 41.4% over specialized frameworks and 23.4% over GPT-4o on T-IC13, with consistent gains on the challenging T-SROIE benchmark. Our dataset, model, and code will be publicly released.

Fanwei Zeng, Changtao Miao, Jing Huang +8

Ant Group · Nanyang Technological University · CFAR and IHPC, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

Text Forgery DetectionImage Forgery DetectionDigital Image ForensicsImage Forgery LocalizationMultimodal CoT Reasoning
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Mar 30, 2026

TGIF2: Extended Text-Guided Inpainting Forgery Dataset & Benchmark

Generative AI has made text-guided inpainting a powerful image editing tool, but at the same time a growing challenge for media forensics. Existing benchmarks, including our text-guided inpainting forgery (TGIF) dataset, show that image forgery localization (IFL) methods can localize manipulations in spliced images but struggle not in fully regenerated (FR) images, while synthetic image detection (SID) methods can detect fully regenerated images but cannot perform localization. With new generative inpainting models emerging and the open problem of localization in FR images remaining, updated datasets and benchmarks are needed. We introduce TGIF2, an extended version of TGIF, that captures recent advances in text-guided inpainting and enables a deeper analysis of forensic robustness. TGIF2 augments the original dataset with edits generated by FLUX.1 models, as well as with random non-semantic masks. Using the TGIF2 dataset, we conduct a forensic evaluation spanning IFL and SID, including fine-tuning IFL methods on FR images and generative super-resolution attacks. Our experiments show that both IFL and SID methods degrade on FLUX.1 manipulations, highlighting limited generalization. Additionally, while fine-tuning improves localization on FR images, evaluation with random non-semantic masks reveals object bias. Furthermore, generative super-resolution significantly weakens forensic traces, demonstrating that common image enhancement operations can undermine current forensic pipelines. In summary, TGIF2 provides an updated dataset and benchmark, which enables new insights into the challenges posed by modern inpainting and AI-based image enhancements. TGIF2 is available at https://github.com/IDLabMedia/tgif-dataset.

Hannes Mareen, Dimitrios Karageorgiou, Paschalis Giakoumoglou +3

IDLab, Ghent University – imec, Gent, Belgium. · Information Technologies Institute, CERTH, Thessaloniki, Greece.

Digital Image ForensicsImage Forgery LocalizationAI-Generated Image DetectionImage Inpainting
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Mar 29, 2026

AI-Powered Facial Mask Removal Is Not Suitable For Identification

Recently, crowd-sourced online criminal investigations have used generative-AI to enhance low-quality visual evidence. In one high-profile case, social-media users circulated an "AI-unmasked" image of a federal agent involved in a fatal shooting, fueling a wide-spread misidentification. In response to this and similar incidents, we conducted a large-scale analysis evaluating the efficacy and risks of commercial AI-powered facial unmasking, specifically assessing whether the resulting faces can be reliably matched to true identities.

Emily A Cooper, Hany Farid

Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science University of California, Berkeley · School of Information University of California, Berkeley

Digital Image ForensicsFace Recognition
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Mar 25, 2026

Beyond Semantic Priors: Mitigating Optimization Collapse for Generalizable Visual Forensics

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have emerged as a dominant paradigm for generalizable deepfake detection, a representational disconnect remains: their semantic-centric pre-training is ill-suited for capturing non-semantic artifacts inherent to hyper-realistic synthesis. In this work, we identify a failure mode termed Optimization Collapse, where detectors trained with Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) degenerate to random guessing on non-semantic forgeries once the perturbation radius exceeds a narrow threshold. To theoretically formalize this collapse, we propose the Critical Optimization Radius (COR) to quantify the geometric stability of the optimization landscape, and leverage the Gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio (GSNR) to measure generalization potential. We establish a theorem proving that COR increases monotonically with GSNR, thereby revealing that the geometric instability of SAM optimization originates from degraded intrinsic generalization potential. This result identifies the layer-wise attenuation of GSNR as the root cause of Optimization Collapse in detecting non-semantic forgeries. Although naively reducing perturbation radius yields stable convergence under SAM, it merely treats the symptom without mitigating the intrinsic generalization degradation, necessitating enhanced gradient fidelity. Building on this insight, we propose the Contrastive Regional Injection Transformer (CoRIT), which integrates a computationally efficient Contrastive Gradient Proxy (CGP) with three training-free strategies: Region Refinement Mask to suppress CGP variance, Regional Signal Injection to preserve CGP magnitude, and Hierarchical Representation Integration to attain more generalizable representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoRIT mitigates optimization collapse and achieves state-of-the-art generalization across cross-domain and universal forgery benchmarks.

Jipeng Liu, Haichao Shi, Siyu Xing +2

Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100193, China · School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Deepfake DetectionDigital Image ForensicsSharpness-Aware Minimization
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Mar 24, 2026

AgentFoX: LLM Agent-Guided Fusion with eXplainability for AI-Generated Image Detection

The realism of AI-generated images (AIGI) poses increasing challenges for reliable forensic detection, where heterogeneous expert detectors may produce conflicting predictions across diverse generative sources and post-processing conditions. Existing multi-expert fusion methods rely on fixed rules or learned fusion strategies, offering limited ability to assess sample-specific reliability, execute rigorous adjudication of conflicts, and provide evidence-grounded explanations. We propose AgentFoX, an LLM-driven agentic multi-expert framework for AIGI detection that employs a command-and-reasoning core to perform evidence fusion. Following predefined guidelines, the core coordinates designated subtasks to collect semantic and signal-level evidence, reason over structured contexts to determine authenticity, and generate an auditable report for explainability. During this process, Expert Profiles are constructed for model-centric reliability assessment, while Clustering Profiles are built for data-centric contextual analysis, jointly establishing evidence contexts for conflict resolution. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of AgentFoX under complex conditions.

Yangxin Yu, Yue Zhou, Bin Li +4

Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Media Security, and SZU-AFS Joint Innovation Center for AI Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China · School of Cyber Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, China · Smart City Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Shenzhen, China

Explainable Artificial IntelligenceDigital Image ForensicsLLM AgentsAI-Generated Image Detection
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Mar 18, 2026

Rel-Zero: Harnessing Patch-Pair Invariance for Robust Zero-Watermarking Against AI Editing

Recent advancements in diffusion-based image editing pose a significant threat to the authenticity of digital visual content. Traditional embedding-based watermarking methods often introduce perceptible perturbations to maintain robustness, inevitably compromising visual fidelity. Meanwhile, existing zero-watermarking approaches, typically relying on global image features, struggle to withstand sophisticated manipulations. In this work, we uncover a key observation: while individual image patches undergo substantial alterations during AI-based editing, the relational distance between patch pairs remains relatively invariant. Leveraging this property, we propose Relational Zero-Watermarking (Rel-Zero), a novel framework that requires no modification to the original image but derives a unique zero-watermark from these editing-invariant patch relations. By grounding the watermark in intrinsic structural consistency rather than absolute appearance, Rel-Zero provides a non-invasive yet resilient mechanism for content authentication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Rel-Zero achieves substantially improved robustness across diverse editing models and manipulations compared to prior zero-watermarking approaches.

Pengzhen Chen, Yanwei Liu, Xiaoyan Gu +3

Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense +1

Robust WatermarkingDigital Image Forensics
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Mar 12, 2026

GPT4o-Receipt: A Dataset and Human Study for AI-Generated Document Forensics

Can humans detect AI-generated financial documents better than machines? We present GPT4o-Receipt, a benchmark of 1,235 receipt images pairing GPT-4o-generated receipts with authentic ones from established datasets, evaluated by five state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs and a 30-annotator crowdsourced perceptual study. Our findings reveal a striking paradox: humans are better at seeing AI artifacts, yet worse at detecting AI documents. Human annotators exhibit the largest visual discrimination gap of any evaluator, yet their binary detection F1 falls well below Claude Sonnet 4 and below Gemini 2.5 Flash. This paradox resolves once the mechanism is understood: the dominant forensic signals in AI-generated receipts are arithmetic errors -- invisible to visual inspection but systematically verifiable by LLMs. Humans cannot perceive that a subtotal is incorrect; LLMs verify it in milliseconds. Beyond the human--LLM comparison, our five-model evaluation reveals dramatic performance disparities and calibration differences that render simple accuracy metrics insufficient for detector selection. GPT4o-Receipt, the evaluation framework, and all results are released publicly to support future research in AI document forensics.

Yan Zhang, Simiao Ren, Ankit Raj +6

Digital Image ForensicsAI-Generated Text DetectionGenerative AI EvaluationDocument Image Understanding
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Mar 9, 2026

Diffusion-Based Authentication of Copy Detection Patterns: A Multimodal Framework with Printer Signature Conditioning

Counterfeiting affects diverse industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, and food, posing serious health and economic risks. Printable unclonable codes, such as Copy Detection Patterns (CDPs), are widely used as an anti-counterfeiting measure and are applied to products and packaging. However, the increasing availability of high-resolution printing and scanning devices, along with advances in generative deep learning, undermines traditional authentication systems, which often fail to distinguish high-quality counterfeits from genuine prints. In this work, we propose a diffusion-based authentication framework that jointly leverages the original binary template, the printed CDP, and a representation of printer identity that captures relevant semantic information. Formulating authentication as multi-class printer classification over printer signatures lets our model capture fine-grained, device-specific features via spatial and textual conditioning. We extend ControlNet by repurposing the denoising process for class-conditioned noise prediction, enabling effective printer classification. On the Indigo 1 x 1 Base dataset, our method outperforms traditional similarity metrics and prior deep learning approaches. Results show the framework generalises to counterfeit types unseen during training.

Bolutife Atoki, Iuliia Tkachenko, Bertrand Kerautret +1

Universit´e Lumi`ere Lyon 2, CNRS, INSA Lyon, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1, LIRIS UMR5205, 69007 Lyon, France

Digital Image ForensicsImage Forgery DetectionConditional Diffusion Models
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Mar 2, 2026

Deepfake Forensics Adapter: A Dual-Stream Network for Generalizable Deepfake Detection

The rapid advancement of deepfake generation techniques poses significant threats to public safety and causes societal harm through the creation of highly realistic synthetic facial media. While existing detection methods demonstrate limitations in generalizing to emerging forgery patterns, this paper presents Deepfake Forensics Adapter (DFA), a novel dual-stream framework that synergizes vision-language foundation models with targeted forensics analysis. Our approach integrates a pre-trained CLIP model with three core components to achieve specialized deepfake detection by leveraging the powerful general capabilities of CLIP without changing CLIP parameters: 1) A Global Feature Adapter is used to identify global inconsistencies in image content that may indicate forgery, 2) A Local Anomaly Stream enhances the model's ability to perceive local facial forgery cues by explicitly leveraging facial structure priors, and 3) An Interactive Fusion Classifier promotes deep interaction and fusion between global and local features using a transformer encoder. Extensive evaluations of frame-level and video-level benchmarks demonstrate the superior generalization capabilities of DFA, particularly achieving state-of-the-art performance in the challenging DFDC dataset with frame-level AUC/EER of 0.816/0.256 and video-level AUC/EER of 0.836/0.251, representing a 4.8% video AUC improvement over previous methods. Our framework not only demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, but also points out a feasible and effective direction for developing a robust deepfake detection system with enhanced generalization capabilities against the evolving deepfake threats. Our code is available at https://github.com/Liao330/DFA.git

Jianfeng Liao, Yichen Wei, Raymond Chan Ching Bon +3

Shenzhen Technology University, Guangdong, China · Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, Singapore · The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China +1

Deepfake DetectionDigital Image ForensicsVLM Adaptation
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Mar 2, 2026

DOCFORGE-BENCH: A Comprehensive 0-shot Benchmark for Document Forgery Detection and Analysis

We present DOCFORGE-BENCH, the first unified zero-shot benchmark for document forgery detection, evaluating 14 methods across eight datasets spanning text tampering, receipt forgery, and identity document manipulation. Unlike fine-tuning-oriented evaluations such as ForensicHub [Du et al., 2025], DOCFORGE-BENCH applies all methods with their published pretrained weights and no domain adaptation -- a deliberate design choice that reflects the realistic deployment scenario where practitioners lack labeled document training data. Our central finding is a pervasive calibration failure invisible under single-threshold protocols: methods achieve moderate Pixel-AUC (>=0.76) yet near-zero Pixel-F1. This AUC-F1 gap is not a discrimination failure but a score-distribution shift: tampered regions occupy only 0.27-4.17% of pixels in document images -- an order of magnitude less than in natural image benchmarks -- making the standard tau=0.5 threshold catastrophically miscalibrated. Oracle-F1 is 2-10x higher than fixed-threshold Pixel-F1, confirming that calibration, not representation, is the bottleneck. A controlled calibration experiment validates this: adapting a single threshold on N=10 domain images recovers 39-55% of the Oracle-F1 gap, demonstrating that threshold adaptation -- not retraining -- is the key missing step for practical deployment. Overall, no evaluated method works reliably out-of-the-box on diverse document types, underscoring that document forgery detection remains an unsolved problem. We further note that all eight datasets predate the era of generative AI editing; benchmarks covering diffusion- and LLM-based document forgeries represent a critical open gap on the modern attack surface.

Zengqi Zhao, Weidi Xia, En Wei +7

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · University of California, Irvine · Washington University in St. Louis +4

Text Forgery DetectionDigital ForensicsDigital Image ForensicsModel Calibration
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Feb 26, 2026

All in One: Unifying Deepfake Detection, Tampering Localization, and Source Tracing with a Robust Landmark-Identity Watermark

With the rapid advancement of deepfake technology, malicious face manipulations pose a significant threat to personal privacy and social security. However, existing proactive forensics methods typically treat deepfake detection, tampering localization, and source tracing as independent tasks, lacking a unified framework to address them jointly. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified proactive forensics framework that jointly addresses these three core tasks. Our core framework adopts an innovative 152-dimensional landmark-identity watermark termed LIDMark, which structurally interweaves facial landmarks with a unique source identifier. To robustly extract the LIDMark, we design a novel Factorized-Head Decoder (FHD). Its architecture factorizes the shared backbone features into two specialized heads (i.e., regression and classification), robustly reconstructing the embedded landmarks and identifier, respectively, even when subjected to severe distortion or tampering. This design realizes an "all-in-one" trifunctional forensic solution: the regression head underlies an "intrinsic-extrinsic" consistency check for detection and localization, while the classification head robustly decodes the source identifier for tracing. Extensive experiments show that the proposed LIDMark framework provides a unified, robust, and imperceptible solution for the detection, localization, and tracing of deepfake content. The code is available at https://github.com/vpsg-research/LIDMark.

Junjiang Wu, Liejun Wang, Zhiqing Guo

School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, China · Xinjiang Multimodal Intelligent Processing and Information Security Engineering Technology Research Center, Urumqi, China

Digital Image ForensicsDigital ForensicsDeepfake DetectionImage Forgery LocalizationRobust Watermarking
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Feb 24, 2026

AIForge-Doc: A Benchmark for Detecting AI-Forged Tampering in Financial and Form Documents

We present AIForge-Doc, the first dedicated benchmark targeting exclusively diffusion-model-based inpainting in financial and form documents with pixel-level annotation. Existing document forgery datasets rely on traditional digital editing tools (e.g., Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), creating a critical gap: state-of-the-art detectors are blind to the rapidly growing threat of AI-forged document fraud. AIForge-Doc addresses this gap by systematically forging numeric fields in real-world receipt and form images using two AI inpainting APIs -- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Ideogram v2 Edit -- yielding 4,061 forged images from four public document datasets (CORD, WildReceipt, SROIE, XFUND) across nine languages, annotated with pixel-precise tampered-region masks in DocTamper-compatible format. We benchmark three representative detectors -- TruFor, DocTamper, and a zero-shot GPT-4o judge -- and find that all existing methods degrade substantially: TruFor achieves AUC=0.751 (zero-shot, out-of-distribution) vs. AUC=0.96 on NIST16; DocTamper achieves AUC=0.563 vs. AUC=0.98 in-distribution, with pixel-level IoU=0.020; GPT-4o achieves only 0.509 -- essentially at chance -- confirming that AI-forged values are indistinguishable to automated detectors and VLMs. These results demonstrate that AIForge-Doc represents a qualitatively new and unsolved challenge for document forensics.

Jiaqi Wu, Yuchen Zhou, Muduo Xu +6

Duke University · New York University · University of North Carolina +1

Text Forgery DetectionImage Forgery DetectionDigital Image ForensicsDigital ForensicsImage Forgery Localization
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Feb 21, 2026

FOCA: Frequency-Oriented Cross-Domain Forgery Detection, Localization and Explanation via Multi-Modal Large Language Model

Advances in image tampering techniques, particularly generative models, pose significant challenges to media verification, digital forensics, and public trust. Existing image forgery detection and localization (IFDL) methods suffer from two key limitations: over-reliance on semantic content while neglecting textural cues, and limited interpretability of subtle low-level tampering traces. To address these issues, we propose FOCA, a multimodal large language model-based framework that integrates discriminative features from both the RGB spatial and frequency domains via a cross-attention fusion module. This design enables accurate forgery detection and localization while providing explicit, human-interpretable cross-domain explanations. We further introduce FSE-Set, a large-scale dataset with diverse authentic and tampered images, pixel-level masks, and dual-domain annotations. Extensive experiments show that FOCA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection performance and interpretability across both spatial and frequency domains.

Zhou Liu, Tonghua Su, Hongshi Zhang +4

Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China · DZ-Matrix · Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ), Shenzhen, China +2

Image Forgery DetectionDigital Image ForensicsImage Forgery LocalizationMultimodal Model Interpretability
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Feb 21, 2026

Detecting AI-Generated Forgeries via Iterative Manifold Deviation Amplification

The proliferation of highly realistic AI-generated images poses critical challenges for digital forensics, demanding precise pixel-level localization of manipulated regions. Existing methods predominantly learn discriminative patterns of specific forgeries and often struggle with novel manipulations as editing techniques continue to evolve. We propose the Iterative Forgery Amplifier Network (IFA-Net), which shifts from learning "what is fake" to modeling "what is real". Grounded in the principle that all manipulations deviate from the natural image manifold, IFA-Net leverages a frozen Masked Autoencoder (MAE) pretrained on real images as a universal realness prior. Our framework operates through a two-stage closed-loop process: an initial Dual-Stream Segmentation Network (DSSN) fuses the original image with MAE reconstruction residuals for coarse localization, followed by a Task-Adaptive Prior Injection (TAPI) module that converts this coarse prediction into guiding prompts to steer the MAE decoder and amplify reconstruction failures in suspicious regions for precise refinement. Extensive experiments on four diffusion-based inpainting benchmarks show that IFA-Net achieves an average improvement of 6.5% in IoU and 8.1% in F1-score over the second-best method, while demonstrating strong generalization to traditional manipulation types.

Jiangling Zhang, Shuxuan Gao, Bofan Liu +4

1Wuhan University of Technology

Image Forgery LocalizationDigital Image ForensicsReconstruction-Based Anomaly Detection
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Jan 20, 2026

NewsRECON: News Article Retrieval for Image Contextualization

Identifying when and where a news image was taken is crucial for journalists and forensic experts to produce credible stories and debunk misinformation. While many existing methods rely on reverse image search (RIS) engines, these tools often fail to return results, thereby limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we address the challenging scenario where RIS evidence is unavailable. We investigate the potential of news article corpora as an alternative to RIS, linking images to relevant articles to infer their dates and locations from article metadata. We evaluate the performance of a news article retrieval pipeline, NewsRECON, which leverages a corpus of over 85,000 articles. Experiments on the TARA dataset show that NewsRECON outperforms prior work and can be combined with a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to achieve new SOTA results in the absence of RIS evidence. Furthermore, NewsRECON generalizes to the 5Pils-OOC benchmark despite geographic and temporal shifts. We make our code available.

Jonathan Tonglet, Iryna Gurevych, Tinne Tuytelaars +1

Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP Lab), Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt and National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity ATHENE · Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven · Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven

Multimodal IRDigital Image ForensicsInformation Retrieval
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Nov 24, 2025

Evaluating Deep Learning and Traditional Approaches Used in Source Camera Identification

Identifying the device that captured a digital image is a central task in image forensics, made more urgent by pervasive smartphone photography and the rise of AI-generated imagery. This paper compares three source camera identification (SCI) approaches - Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) analysis, JPEG compression artifact analysis, and a convolutional neural network (CNN) - on images from four smartphone devices (Xiaomi Redmi Note 10S, Samsung Galaxy S24, iPhone 13 Pro Max, and iPhone 17 Pro). For each method, discriminative features are extracted (DCT coefficient statistics for JPEG artifacts, denoised noise residuals for PRNU, and learned convolutional features for the CNN) and classified with an SVM (JPEG, PRNU) or trained end-to-end (CNN), using an identical fixed, stratified 70/30 train-test split for direct comparability. The DCT/JPEG-artifact-inspired classifier achieves the highest accuracy (0.90), followed by the PRNU-inspired method (0.71), while the CNN baseline reaches only 0.29. Under this experimental configuration, the DCT/statistical and PRNU-inspired approaches outperform the evaluated CNN baseline. The results motivate evaluation on larger, format-balanced datasets and investigation of hybrid or learned approaches under more robust validation protocols.

Mansur Ozaman

Nazarbayev Intellectual School of Science and Mathematics in Medeu District of Almaty

Digital Image Forensics
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Oct 3, 2025

UniShield: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Unified Forgery Image Detection and Localization

With the rapid advancements in image generation, synthetic images have become increasingly realistic, posing significant societal risks, such as misinformation and fraud. Forgery Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) thus emerges as essential for maintaining information integrity and societal security. Despite impressive performances by existing domain-specific detection methods, their practical applicability remains limited, primarily due to their narrow specialization, poor cross-domain generalization, and the absence of an integrated adaptive framework. To address these issues, we propose UniShield, the novel multi-agent-based unified system capable of detecting and localizing image forgeries across diverse domains, including image manipulation, document manipulation, DeepFake, and AI-generated images. UniShield innovatively integrates a perception agent with a detection agent. The perception agent intelligently analyzes image features to dynamically select suitable detection models, while the detection agent consolidates various expert detectors into a unified framework and generates interpretable reports. Extensive experiments show that UniShield achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing both existing unified approaches and domain-specific detectors, highlighting its superior practicality, adaptiveness, and scalability.

Qing Huang, Zhipei Xu, Xuanyu Zhang +2

School of Future Technology, South China University of Technology · School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University · School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology +1

Image Forgery DetectionAdaptive Model RoutingDigital Image ForensicsImage Forgery LocalizationDeepfake DetectionAI-Generated Image Detection
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Apr 10, 2025

Learning Universal Features for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization

In recent years, advanced image editing and generation methods have rapidly evolved, making detecting and locating forged image content increasingly challenging. Most existing image forgery detection methods rely on identifying the edited traces left in the image. However, because the traces of different forgeries are distinct, these methods can identify familiar forgeries included in the training data but struggle to handle unseen ones. In response, we present an approach for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization (GIFL). Once trained, our model can detect both seen and unseen forgeries, providing a more practical and efficient solution to counter false information in the era of generative AI. Our method focuses on learning general features from the pristine content rather than traces of specific forgeries, which are relatively consistent across different types of forgeries and therefore can be used as universal features to locate unseen forgeries. Additionally, as existing image forgery datasets are still dominated by traditional hand-crafted forgeries, we construct a new dataset consisting of images edited by various popular deep generative image editing methods to further encourage research in detecting images manipulated by deep generative models. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the detection of unseen forgeries and also demonstrates competitive results for seen forgeries. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhaoHengrun/GIFL.

Hengrun Zhao, Yunzhi Zhuge, Yifan Wang +3

Dalian University of Technology · Johns Hopkins University

Image Forgery DetectionImage Forgery LocalizationDigital Image Forensics
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Feb 27, 2025

Fully AI-Generated Image Detection: Definition, Recent Advances and Challenges

Recent advances in visual generative models have enabled the creation of highly realistic, fully AI-generated images without relying on real source content. While beneficial for many applications, these models also pose significant societal risks, as they can be easily exploited to produce convincing Deepfakes. Detecting them represents a foundational yet challenging problem in AI media forensics, requiring detectors to reliably extract the inherent artifacts imprinted by generative architectures. In this Review, we provide a systematic overview of fully AI-generated image detection. Following the standard detector design pipeline, we focus on two key components: dataset construction and artifact extraction. We analyze how dataset design influences the generalization and robustness of learned artifacts, and categorize existing artifact extraction methods based on the primary inductive priors leveraged to isolate artifacts. Within this framework, we systematically review existing works. Finally, we highlight open problems and envision several future directions for developing more robust and generalizable detectors. Reviewed works in this survey can be found at https://github.com/zju-pi/Awesome-Fully-AI-Generated-Image-Detection.

Qijie Xu, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen +2

State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security, Hangzhou, China. · Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA.

Digital Image ForensicsAI-Generated Image Detection
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Dec 3, 2024

Copy-Move Forgery Detection and Question Answering for Remote Sensing Image

Driven by practical demands in land resource monitoring and national defense security, this paper introduces the Remote Sensing Copy-Move Question Answering (RSCMQA) task. Unlike traditional Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA), RSCMQA focuses on interpreting complex tampering scenarios and inferring relationships between objects. We present a suite of global RSCMQA datasets, comprising images from 29 different regions across 14 countries. Specifically, we propose five distinct datasets, including the basic dataset RS-CMQA, the category-balanced dataset RS-CMQA-B, the high-authenticity dataset Real-RSCM, the extended dataset RS-TQA, and the extended category-balanced dataset RS-TQA-B. These datasets fill a critical gap in the field while ensuring comprehensiveness, balance, and challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a region-discrimination-guided multimodal copy-move forgery perception framework (CMFPF), which enhances the accuracy of answering questions about tampered images by leveraging prompts about the differences and connections between the source and tampered regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a stronger benchmark for RSCMQA compared to general VQA and RSVQA models. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shenyedepisa/RSCMQA.

Ze Zhang, Enyuan Zhao, Di Niu +3

Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, 266100, China

Remote Sensing Image UnderstandingImage Forgery DetectionDigital Image ForensicsMultimodal QARemote Sensing
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