Seam Carving Forgery Detection Through Multi-Perspective Explainable AI

This paper addresses the critical challenge of detecting content-aware image manipulations, specifically focusing on seam carving forgery. While deep learning models, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown promise in this area, their black-box nature limits their trustworthiness in high-stakes domains like digital forensics. To address this gap, we propose and validate a framework for interpretable forgery detection, termed E-XAI (Ensemble Explainable AI). Conceptually inspired by Ensemble Learning, our framework's novelty lies not in combining predictive models, but in integrating a multi-perspective ensemble of explainability techniques. Specifically, we combine SHAP for fine-grained, pixel-level feature attribution with Grad-CAM for region-level localization to create a more robust and holistic interpretation of a single, custom-trained CNN's decisions. Our approach is validated on a purpose-built, balanced, binary-class dataset of 10,300 images. The results demonstrate high classification performance on an unseen test set, with a 95% accuracy and a 99% precision for the forged class. Furthermore, we analyze the model's robustness against JPEG compression, a common real-world perturbation. More importantly, the application of the E-XAI framework reveals how the model identifies subtle forgery artifacts, providing transparent, visual evidence for its decisions. This work contributes a robust end-to-end pipeline for interpretable image forgery detection, enhancing the trust and reliability of AI systems in information security.