Detection of Deep Network Generated Images Using Disparities in Color Components

With the powerful deep network architectures, such as generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders, large amounts of photorealistic images can be generated. The generated images, already fooling human eyes successfully, are not initially targeted for deceiving image authentication systems. However, research communities as well as public media show great concerns on whether these images would lead to serious security issues. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting deep network generated (DNG) images by analyzing the disparities in color components between real scene images and DNG images. Existing deep networks generate images in RGB color space and have no explicit constrains on color correlations; therefore, DNG images have more obvious differences from real images in other color spaces, such as HSV and YCbCr, especially in the chrominance components. Besides, the DNG images are different from the real ones when considering red, green, and blue components together. Based on these observations, we propose a feature set to capture color image statistics for detecting the DNG images. Moreover, three different detection scenarios in practice are considered and the corresponding detection strategies are designed. Extensive experiments have been conducted on face image datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to distinguish the DNG images from real ones with high accuracies.