Detection of computer graphics using attention-based dual-branch convolutional neural network from fused color components

• Main Authors: He, Peisong, Li, Haoliang, Wang, Hongxia, Zhang, Ruimei
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering; Image Forensics; Computer Graphics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/145686
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the development of 3D rendering techniques, people can create photorealistic computer graphics (CG) easily with the advanced software, which is of great benefit to the video game and film industries. On the other hand, the abuse of CGs has threatened the integrity and authenticity of digital images. In the last decade, several detection methods of CGs have been proposed successfully. However, existing methods cannot provide reliable detection results for CGs with the small patch size and post-processing operations. To overcome the above-mentioned limitation, we proposed an attention-based dual-branch convolutional neural network (AD-CNN) to extract robust representations from fused color components. In pre-processing, raw RGB components and their blurred version with Gaussian low-pass filter are stacked together in channel-wise as the input for the AD-CNN, which aims to help the network learn more generalized patterns. The proposed AD-CNN starts with a dual-branch structure where two branches work in parallel and have the identical shallow CNN architecture, except that the first convolutional layer in each branch has various kernel sizes to exploit low-level forensics traces in multi-scale. The output features from each branch are jointly optimized by the attention-based fusion module which can assign the asymmetric weights to different branches automatically. Finally, the fused feature is fed into the following fully-connected layers to obtain final detection results. Comparative and self-analysis experiments have demonstrated the better detection capability and robustness of the proposed detection compared with other state-of-the-art methods under various experimental settings, especially for image patch with the small size and post-processing operations.