A hybrid convolutional architecture for accurate image manipulation localization at the pixel-level

Advanced image processing techniques can easily edit images without leaving any visible traces, making manipulation detection and localization for forensics analysis a challenging task. Few studies can simultaneously locate tampered objects accurately and refine contours of tampered regions effectively. In this study, we propose an effective and novel hybrid architecture, named Pixel-level Image Tampering Localization Architecture (PITLArc), which integrates the advantages of top-down detection-based methods and bottom-up segmentation-based methods. Moreover, we provide a typical fusion implementation of our proposed hybrid architecture on one outstanding detection-based method (two-stream faster region-based convolutional neural network (RGB-N)) and two segmentation-based methods (Multi-Scale Convolution Neural Networks (MSCNNs) and Dual-domain Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs)) to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. The three methods can be integrated into our proposed PITLArc to significantly improve their performance. Other detection and segmentation algorithms (not limited to the three aforementioned methods) can also be integrated into our architecture to improve their performance. Moreover, a Dense Conditional Random Fields (DenseCRFs)-based post-processing method is introduced to further optimize the details of tampered regions. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.