GCA-Net : Utilizing Gated Context Attention for Improving Image Forgery Localization and Detection
This addresses the challenge of image forgery detection for forensic analysis, offering an incremental improvement over existing networks.
The paper tackles the problem of localizing and detecting forged regions in images by proposing GCA-Net, which uses gated context attention to capture subtle discrepancies, resulting in an average 4.7% AUC improvement over state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks.
Forensic analysis of manipulated pixels requires the identification of various hidden and subtle features from images. Conventional image recognition models generally fail at this task because they are biased and more attentive toward the dominant local and spatial features. In this paper, we propose a novel Gated Context Attention Network (GCA-Net) that utilizes non-local attention in conjunction with a gating mechanism in order to capture the finer image discrepancies and better identify forged regions. The proposed framework uses high dimensional embeddings to filter and aggregate the relevant context from coarse feature maps at various stages of the decoding process. This improves the network's understanding of global differences and reduces false-positive localizations. Our evaluation on standard image forensic benchmarks shows that GCA-Net can both compete against and improve over state-of-the-art networks by an average of 4.7% AUC. Additional ablation studies also demonstrate the method's robustness against attributions and resilience to false-positive predictions.