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© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The rapid development of generative adversarial networks has significantly advanced the generation of synthetic images, presenting valuable opportunities and ethical dilemmas in their potential misuse across various industries. The necessity to distinguish real from AI-generated content is becoming increasingly critical to preserve the integrity of online data. While traditional methods for detecting fake images resulting from image tampering rely on hand-crafted features, the sophistication of manipulated images produced by generative adversarial networks requires more advanced detection approaches. The lightweight approach proposed here is based on convolutional neural networks that comprise only eight convolutional and two hidden layers that effectively differentiate AI-generated images from real ones. The proposed approach was assessed using two benchmark datasets and custom-generated data from Sentinel-2 imagery. It demonstrated superior performance compared to four state-of-the-art methods on the CIFAKE dataset, achieving the highest accuracy of 97.32%, on par with the highest-performing state-of-the-art method. Explainable AI is utilized to enhance our comprehension of the complex processes involved in synthetic image recognition. We have shown that, unlike authentic images, where activations often center around the main object, in synthetic images, activations cluster around the edges of objects, in the background, or in areas with complex textures.

Details

Title
Detection of AI-Generated Synthetic Images with a Lightweight CNN
Author
Lađević, Adrian Lokner 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Kramberger, Tin 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Kramberger, Renata 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Vlahek, Dino 2   VIAFID ORCID Logo 

 Department of Information Technology and Computing, Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Vrbik 8, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia; adrian.lokner.ladjevic@gmail.com (A.L.L.); tin.kramberger@tvz.hr (T.K.); renata.kramberger@tvz.hr (R.K.) 
 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Maribor, Koroška Cesta 46, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia 
First page
1575
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
26732688
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3110288618
Copyright
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.