Did You Note My Palette? Unveiling Synthetic Images Through Color Statistics

Uhlenbrock L, Cozzolino D, Moussa D, Verdoliva L, Riess C (2024)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2024

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Pages Range: 47-52

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security

Event location: Baiona ES

ISBN: 9798400706370

DOI: 10.1145/3658664.3659652

Open Access Link: https://faui1-files.cs.fau.de/public/publications/mmsec/2024-Uhlenbrock-IHMMSec.pdf

Abstract

High-quality artificially generated images are widely available now and increasingly realistic, posing challenges for image forensics in distinguishing them from real ones. Unfortunately, building a single detector that generalizes well to unseen generators is very difficult, creating the need for diverse cues. In this paper, we show that natural and synthetic images differ in their color statistics, possibly due to the widely used perceptual loss, which is more sensitive to brightness than to chroma differences. Consequently, color statistics offer valuable cues for forensic analysis and the development of robust detectors. Our experiments using simple hand-crafted color functions with a random forest achieve 91% accuracy averaged over all tested Diffusion Models, even with limited training samples.

Authors with CRIS profile

Lea Uhlenbrock Graduiertenkolleg 2475 Cyberkriminalität und Forensische Informatik Denise Moussa Lehrstuhl für Informatik 1 (IT-Sicherheitsinfrastrukturen) Christian Rieß Lehrstuhl für Informatik 1 (IT-Sicherheitsinfrastrukturen)

Additional Organisation(s)

Graduiertenkolleg 2475 Cyberkriminalität und Forensische Informatik

Related research project(s)

Cybercrime and Forensic Computing -- Hardware Security (GRK 2475) GRK2475: Cyberkriminalität und Forensische Informatik Oct. 1, 2019 - Oct. 1, 2028 Cyberkriminalität und forensische Informatik (Cybercrime) Oct. 1, 2019 - March 31, 2024

Involved external institutions

Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II IT Italy (IT)

How to cite

APA:

Uhlenbrock, L., Cozzolino, D., Moussa, D., Verdoliva, L., & Riess, C. (2024). Did You Note My Palette? Unveiling Synthetic Images Through Color Statistics. In Association for Computing Machinery (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (pp. 47-52). Baiona, ES: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

MLA:

Uhlenbrock, Lea, et al. "Did You Note My Palette? Unveiling Synthetic Images Through Color Statistics." Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, Baiona Ed. Association for Computing Machinery, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2024. 47-52.

BibTeX: Download