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Synthetic images aid the recognition of human-made art forgeries (arxiv.org)
29 points by evanb on Feb 23, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 8 comments on HN

In plain words: Since known forgeries are scarce, they trained a checker that separates an artist's real paintings from human-made fakes, padding the training set with AI-generated pictures in the same style. Adding those synthetic fakes consistently improved detection of human-made forgeries for Van Gogh, Modigliani, and Raphael.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that Artificial Intelligence is capable of distinguishing between authentic paintings by a given artist and human-made forgeries with remarkable accuracy, provided sufficient training. However, with the limited amount of existing known forgeries, augmentation methods for forgery detection are highly desirable. In this work, we examine the potential of incorporating synthetic artworks into training datasets to enhance the performance of forgery detection. Our investigation focuses on paintings by Vincent van Gogh, for which we release the first dataset specialized for forgery detection. To reinforce our results, we conduct the same analyses on the artists Amedeo Modigliani and Raphael. We train a classifier to distinguish original artworks from forgeries. For this, we use human-made forgeries and imitations in the style of well-known artists and augment our training sets with images in a similar style generated by Stable Diffusion and StyleGAN. We find that the additional synthetic forgeries consistently improve the detection of human-made forgeries. In addition, we find that, in line with previous research, the inclusion of synthetic forgeries in the training also enables the detection of AI-generated forgeries, especially if created using a similar generator.

Johann Ostmeyer, Ludovica Schaerf, Pavel Buividovich, Tessa Charles, Eric Postma, Carina Popovici
arXiv:2312.14998 · cs.CV, cs.AI · submitted Dec 22, 2023 · updated Feb 15, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 15 + 10 pages, 4 + 5 figures, 4 + 10 tables; van Gogh dataset available, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10276928

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If the synthetic images are not classified as forgeries, does that mean they're essentially generating model-specific fuzzed versions of the originals? So rather than just adding noise to the pixels, it's able to pentrate the noise deeper?

That sounds generally useful with deep models.

I posted this more than 6 hours ago, no matter what the timestamp says. This has happened to me before [0] and I still wish the time weren't rewritten.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529099

That's an artifact of HN's second chance pool system. The system is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and links back from there. About the timestamps, there are past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Sorry for the confusion—I know it's weird but if we don't do it, then the threads fill up with other comments about timestamps, like "why is this old post ranking alongside all the new ones". The current system is imperfect but seems to be the available optimum.

I see. A tricky design constraint; if you _indicate_ it's from the second-chance pool it might not get a fair shake but if you don't it'll look old and unpopular and might not get a fair shake. Maybe for something like that an on-hover/tooltip on the timestamp might make sense, but I appreciate the difficulty and your chiming-in to let me know what's going on!
If it’s helpful, in my mind I am personally putting one extra credit tally next to the screen name evans.
It's not about credit; this thread shows that I submitted it. It's about saying I did something at a time when I was asleep.
Sorry. Unfortunately that section of my brain is immutable so I am unable to strike it out.
It's so important to check when one is parking one's time machine.