Multi-supervised encoder-decoder for image forgery localization

Image manipulation localization is one of the most challenging tasks because it pays more attention to tampering artifacts than to image content, which suggests that richer features need to be learned. Unlike many existing solutions, we employ a semantic segmentation network, named Multi-Supervised Encoder–Decoder (MSED), for the detection and localization of forgery images with arbitrary sizes and multiple types of manipulations without extra pre-training. In the basic encoder–decoder framework, the former encodes multi-scale contextual information by atrous convolution at multiple rates, while the latter captures sharper object boundaries by applying upsampling to gradually recover the spatial information. The additional multi-supervised module is designed to guide the training process by multiply adopting pixel-wise Binary Cross-Entropy (BCE) loss after the encoder and each upsampling. Experiments on four standard image manipulation datasets demonstrate that our MSED network achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to alternative baselines.