Detection and localization of image forgeries using improved mask regional convolutional neural network

The research on forgery detection and localization is significant in digital forensics and has attracted increasing attention recently. Traditional methods mostly use handcrafted or shallow-learning based features，but they have limited description ability and heavy computational costs. Recently, deep neural networks have shown to be capable of extracting complex statistical features from high-dimensional inputs and efficiently learning their hierarchical representations. In order to capture more discriminative features between tampered and non-tampered regions，we propose an improved mask regional convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) which attach a Sobel filter to the mask branch of Mask R-CNN in this paper. The Sobel filter acts as an auxiliary task to encourage predicted masks to have similar image gradients to the groundtruth mask. The overall network is capable of detecting two different types of image manipulations, including copy-move and splicing. The experimental results on two standard datasets show that the proposed model outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.