Detect with Style: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Detecting Computer-Generated Images

Abstract

The detection of computer-generated (CG) multimedia content has become of utmost importance due to the advances in digital image processing and computer graphics. Realistic CG images could be used for fraudulent purposes due to the deceiving recognition capabilities of human eyes. So, there is a need to deploy algorithmic tools for distinguishing CG images from natural ones within multimedia forensics. Here, an end-to-end framework is proposed to tackle the problem of distinguishing CG images from natural ones by utilizing supervised contrastive learning and arbitrary style transfer by means of a two-stage deep neural network architecture. This architecture enables discrimination by leveraging per-class embeddings and generating multiple training samples to increase model capacity without the need for a vast amount of initial data. Stochastic weight averaging (SWA) is also employed to improve the generalization and stability of the proposed framework. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the impact of various noise conditions on the classification accuracy and the proposed framework’s generalization ability. The conducted experiments demonstrate superior performance over the existing state-of-the-art methodologies on the public DSTok, Rahmouni, and LSCGB benchmark datasets. Hypothesis testing asserts that the improvements in detection accuracy are statistically significant.