Journal of Xidian University ›› 2024, Vol. 51 ›› Issue (1): 135-146.doi: 10.19665/j.issn1001-2400.20230213

• Computer Science and Technology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Real world image tampering localization combining the self-attention mechanism and convolutional neural networks

ZHONG Hao1,2(), BIAN Shan1,2,3(), WANG Chuntao1,2()   

  1. 1. College of Mathematics and Informatics,South China Agricultural University,Guangzhou 510642,China
    2. Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Intelligent Agriculture,Guangzhou 510642,China
    3. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology,Guangzhou 510006,China
  • Received:2022-12-07 Online:2023-09-06 Published:2023-09-06
  • Contact: BIAN Shan E-mail:zhneo@outlook.com;bianshan@scau.edu.cn;wangct@scau.edu.cn

Abstract:

Image is an important carrier of information dissemination in the era of the mobile Internet,making malicious image tampering one of the potential cybersecurity threats.Different from the image tampering on the object scale in the natural scene,image tampering in the real world exists in forged qualification certificates,forged documentation,forged screenshots,etc.The tampered images in the real world usually involve elaborate manual tampering interventions,so their tampering features are different from those in the natural scene and are more diverse,making the localization of tampered areas in the real world more challenging.Rich dependency information is important in considering the complex and diverse tampering features in the real world.Therefore,in this paper,the convolutional neural network is used for adaptive feature extraction and the reversely connected fully self-attention module is adopted for multi-stage feature attention.Finally,the tamper area is located by merging the multi-stage attentional results.The proposed method outperforms the comparison methods in the real world image tampering localization task with the F1 metric 8.98% higher than that of the mainstream method MVSS-Net and the AUC metric 3.58% higher.Besides,the proposed method also achieves the performance of mainstream methods in the natural scene image tampering localization task,and the evidence that the natural scene tampering features are inconsistent with the real world tampering features is provided.Experimental results in two scenes show that the proposed method can effectively locate the tampered area of the tampered images,and that it is more effective in complicated real world.

Key words: image tampering localization, fake detection, digital image forensics, computer vision, self-attention mechanism, convolutional neural networks

CLC Number: 

  • TP391.41