Can We Get Rid of Handcrafted Feature Extractors? SparseViT: Nonsemantics-Centered, Parameter-Efficient Image Manipulation Localization through Spare-Coding Transformer
This addresses the need for more robust and efficient image manipulation detection, which is crucial for applications like digital forensics and media verification, though it is incremental in improving feature extraction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of image manipulation localization by proposing SparseViT, a method that adaptively extracts non-semantic features without handcrafted extractors, achieving superior generalization and efficiency with up to 80% reduction in FLOPs compared to existing models.
Non-semantic features or semantic-agnostic features, which are irrelevant to image context but sensitive to image manipulations, are recognized as evidential to Image Manipulation Localization (IML). Since manual labels are impossible, existing works rely on handcrafted methods to extract non-semantic features. Handcrafted non-semantic features jeopardize IML model's generalization ability in unseen or complex scenarios. Therefore, for IML, the elephant in the room is: How to adaptively extract non-semantic features? Non-semantic features are context-irrelevant and manipulation-sensitive. That is, within an image, they are consistent across patches unless manipulation occurs. Then, spare and discrete interactions among image patches are sufficient for extracting non-semantic features. However, image semantics vary drastically on different patches, requiring dense and continuous interactions among image patches for learning semantic representations. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Sparse Vision Transformer (SparseViT), which reformulates the dense, global self-attention in ViT into a sparse, discrete manner. Such sparse self-attention breaks image semantics and forces SparseViT to adaptively extract non-semantic features for images. Besides, compared with existing IML models, the sparse self-attention mechanism largely reduced the model size (max 80% in FLOPs), achieving stunning parameter efficiency and computation reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, without any handcrafted feature extractors, SparseViT is superior in both generalization and efficiency across benchmark datasets.