Design and development of forensic techniques for synthetic image identification

The development of powerful and low-cost hardware devices allied with great advances on content editing and authoring tools have pushed the creation of computer generated images (CGI) to a degree of unrivaled realism. Differentiating a photorealistic computer generated image from a real photograph can be a difficult task to naked eyes. Digital forensics techniques can play a significant role in this task. Indeed, important research has been made by our community in this regard. The current approaches focus on single image features aiming at spotting out diferences between real and computer generated images. However, with the current technology advances, there is no universal image characterization technique that completely solves this problem. In our work, we present a complete study of several current CGI vs. Photograph approaches; create a big and heterogeneous dataset to be used as a training and validation database; implement representative methods of the literature; and devise automatic ways to combine the best approaches. We compare the implemented methods using the same validation environment. Approximately 5,000 photographs and 5,000 CGIs with large diversity of content and quality were collected. A total of 13 methods were implemented. Results show that this set of methods, in an integrated approach, can achieve up to 93% of accuracy. The same methods, when combined through the proposed fusion schemes, can achieve an accuracy rate of 97% (a reduction of 57% of the error over the best result alone) (AU)