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On the use of Benford’s law to detect GAN-generated images (arxiv.org)
5 points by ColinWright on May 24, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Benford's law describes how often each digit 1–9 appears first in an image's frequency coefficients; that pattern becomes a short list of numbers a very simple classifier can read. It separates GAN-made images from real photographs without a heavy detector.

Abstract · On the use of Benford's law to detect GAN-generated images

The advent of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architectures has given anyone the ability of generating incredibly realistic synthetic imagery. The malicious diffusion of GAN-generated images may lead to serious social and political consequences (e.g., fake news spreading, opinion formation, etc.). It is therefore important to regulate the widespread distribution of synthetic imagery by developing solutions able to detect them. In this paper, we study the possibility of using Benford's law to discriminate GAN-generated images from natural photographs. Benford's law describes the distribution of the most significant digit for quantized Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients. Extending and generalizing this property, we show that it is possible to extract a compact feature vector from an image. This feature vector can be fed to an extremely simple classifier for GAN-generated image detection purpose.

Nicolò Bonettini, Paolo Bestagini, Simone Milani, Stefano Tubaro
arXiv:2004.07682 · cs.CV, cs.MM, eess.IV · submitted Apr 16, 2020
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