Geometric rectification-based neural network architecture for image manipulation detection

Abstract

Determination of image authenticity usually requires the identification and localization of the manipulated regions of images. Hence, image manipulation detection has become one of the most important tasks in the field of multimedia forensics. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved promising performance in image manipulation detection. However, it is hard for the existing CNN-based manipulation detection approaches to accurately identify and localize the manipulated regions that have undergone geometric transformations, since CNNs are limited by their inability to be geometrically invariant. To address this issue, we propose a geometric rectification-based neural network architecture for image manipulation detection. In this type of network architecture, following the detection of a set of potential manipulated regions (PMRs) using Region Proposal Network, the Spatial Transformer Network is employed to geometrically rectify the convolutional feature maps (CFMs) of these regions to obtain the geometrically rectified CFMs (GR-CFMs). Subsequently, the residual feature maps (RFMs) are computed to capture the characteristic inconsistency between the CFMs and GR-CFMs of each PMR. Finally, the computed RFMs are automatically integrated with the GR-CFMs by a designed attention module to determine whether each PMR is a manipulated region and to localize the manipulated part at the pixel-level. Extensive experiments on the public data set as well as on our challenging data set demonstrate that the proposed network architecture achieves desirable performance in identifying and localizing regions with common tampering artifacts, which involve geometric transformations.