DS-Net: Dual supervision neural network for image manipulation localization

With the rapid development of image editing technology, tampering with images has become easier. Maliciously tampered images lead to serious security problems (e.g., when used as evidence). The current mainstream methods of image tampering are divided into three types which are copy-move, splicing and removal. Many image tampering detection methods can only detect one type of image tampering. Additionally, some methods learn features by suppressing image content, which can result in false positives when identifying tampered areas. In this paper, the authors propose a novel framework named the dual supervision neural network (DS-Net) to localize the tampered regions of images tampered by the three tampering methods mentioned above. First, to extract richer multiscale information, the authors add skip connections to the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module. Second, a channel attention mechanism is introduced to dynamically weigh the results generated by ASPP. Finally, the authors build additional supervised branches for high-level features to further enhance the extraction of these high-level features before fusing them with low-level features. The authors conduct experiments on various standard datasets. Through extensive experiments, the results show that the AUC scores reach 86.4%, 95.3% and 99.6% for CASIA, COVERAGE and NIST16 datasets, respectively, and the F1 scores are 56.0%, 73.4% and 82.7%, respectively. The results demonstrate that the authors' method can accurately locate tampered regions and achieve better performance on various datasets than other methods of the same type.