Spotting fake images with AI

This tampered image (left) can be detected by noting visual artifacts (red rectangle, showing the unnaturally high contrast along the baseball player's edges), compared to authentic regions (the parking lot background); and by noting noise pattern inconsistencies between the tampered regions and the background (as seen in "Noise" image). The "ground-truth" image is the outline of the added (fake) image used in the experiment. Thanks to user-friendly image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, it's becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming to spot some deceptive image manipulations. Now, funded by DARPA, researchers at Adobe and the University of Maryland, College Park have turned to AI to detect the more subtle methods now used in doctoring images. What used to take an image-forensic expert several hours to do can now be done in seconds with AI, says Vlad Morariu, PhD, a senior research scientist at Adobe.