Quantifying the Cost of Reliable Photo Authentication via High-Performance Learned Lossy Representations

Paweł Korus, Nasir Memon

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020

https://openreview.net/forum?id=HyxG3p4twS

https://github.com/pkorus/neural-imaging

Abstract

Detection of photo manipulation relies on subtle statistical traces, notoriously removed by aggressive lossy compression employed online. We demonstrate that end-to-end modeling of complex photo dissemination channels allows for codec optimization with explicit provenance objectives. We design a lightweight trainable lossy image codec, that delivers competitive rate-distortion performance, on par with best hand-engineered alternatives, but has lower computational footprint on modern GPU-enabled platforms. Our results show that significant improvements in manipulation detection accuracy are possible at fractional costs in bandwidth/storage. Our codec improved the accuracy from 37% to 86% even at very low bit-rates, well below the practicality of JPEG (QF 20).

Source Code and Deployed Models

This paper comes with two separate git repositories:

  • neural imaging toolbox contains the source code and scripts needed to construct, train and test the lossy image codec.
  • l3ic codec contains a deployed version of the codec.