Orazio Pontorno

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, particularly in the domains of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), has led to the creation of increasingly sophisticated deepfakes. These synthetic images pose significant challenges for detection systems and present growing concerns in the realm of Cybersecurity. The potential misuse of deepfakes for disinformation, fraud, and identity theft underscores the critical need for robust detection methods. This paper introduces DeepFeatureX-SN (‘Deep Features eXtractors based Siamese Network’), an innovative deep learning model designed to address the complex task of not only distinguishing between real and synthetic images but also identifying the specific employed generative technique (GAN or DM). Our approach makes use of a tripartite structure of specialized base models, each trained using Siamese networks and contrastive learning techniques, to extract discriminative features unique to real, GAN-generated, and DM-generated images. These features are then combined through a CNN-based classifier for final categorization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the model’s superior performance, with a detection accuracy of 97.29%, strong generalization to unseen generative architectures (achieving an average accuracy of 67.40%, which surpasses most existing approaches by over 10%) and robustness against various image manipulations, all of which are crucial for real-world Cybersecurity applications. DeepFeatureX-SN achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets, showing particular strength in detecting images from novel GAN and DM implementations. Furthermore, a comprehensive ablation study validates the effectiveness of each component in our proposed architecture. This research contributes significantly to the field, offering a more nuanced and accurate approach to identifying and categorizing synthetic images. The results obtained in the different configurations in the generalization tests demonstrate the good capabilities of the model, outperforming methods found in the literature.

Synthetic image source attribution is an open challenge, with an increasing number of image generators being released yearly. The complexity and the sheer number of available generative techniques, as well as the scarcity of high-quality open source datasets of diverse nature for this task, make training and benchmarking synthetic image source attribution models very challenging. WILD is a new in-the-Wild Image Linkage Dataset designed to provide a powerful training and benchmarking tool for synthetic image attribution models. The dataset is built out of a closed set of 10 popular commercial generators, which constitutes the training base of attribution models, and an open set of 10 additional generators, simulating a real-world in-the-wild scenario. Each generator is represented by 1,000 images, for a total of 10,000 images in the closed set and 10,000 images in the open set. Half of the images are post-processed with a wide range of operators. WILD allows benchmarking attribution models in a wide range of tasks, including closed and open set identification and verification, and robust attribution with respect to post-processing and adversarial attacks. Models trained on WILD are expected to benefit from the challenging scenario represented by the dataset itself. Moreover, an assessment of seven baseline methodologies on closed and open set attribution is presented, including obustness tests with respect to post-processing.

Deepfakes, synthetic images generated by deep learning algorithms, represent one of the biggest challenges in the field of Digital Forensics. The scientific community is working to develop approaches that can discriminate the origin of digital images (real or AI-generated). However, these methodologies face the challenge of generalization, that is, the ability to discern the nature of an image even if it is generated by an architecture not seen during training. This usually leads to a drop in performance. In this context, we propose a novel approach based on three blocks called Base Models, each of which is responsible for extracting the discriminative features of a specific image class (Diffusion Model-generated, GAN-generated, or REAL) as it is trained by exploiting deliberately unbalanced datasets. The features extracted from each block are then concatenated and processed to discriminate the origin of the input image. Experimental results showed that this approach not only demonstrates good robust capabilities to JPEG compression and other various attacks but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods in several generalization tests.

Deepfakes represent one of the toughest challenges in the world of Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics, especially considering the high-quality results obtained with recent generative AI-based solutions. Almost all generative models leave unique traces in synthetic data that, if analyzed and identified in detail, can be exploited to improve the generalization limitations of existing deepfake detectors. In this paper we analyzed deepfake images in the frequency domain generated by both GAN and Diffusion Model engines, examining in detail the underlying statistical distribution of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients. Recognizing that not all coefficients contribute equally to image detection, we hypothesize the existence of a unique “discriminative fingerprint”, embedded in specific combinations of coefficients. To identify them, Machine Learning classifiers were trained on various combinations of coefficients. In addition, the Explainable AI (XAI) LIME algorithm was used to search for intrinsic discriminative combinations of coefficients. Finally, we performed a robustness test to analyze the persistence of traces by applying JPEG compression. The experimental results reveal the existence of traces left by the generative models that are more discriminative and persistent at JPEG attacks.