A Transformer based Approach for Image Manipulation Chain Detection

Image manipulation chain detection aims to identify the existence of involved operations and also their orders, playing an important role in multimedia forensics and image analysis. However,all the existing algorithms model the manipulation chain detection as a classification problem, and can only detect chains containing up to two operations. Due to the exponentially increased solution space and the complex interactions among operations, how to reveal a long chain from a processed image remains a long-standing problem in the multimedia forensic community. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a new direction for manipulation chain detection. Different from previous works, we treat the manipulation chain detection as a machine translation problem rather than a classification one, where we model the chains as the sentences of a target language, and each word serves as one possible image operation. Specifically, we first transform the manipulated image into a deep feature space, and further model the traces left by the manipulation chain as a sentence of a latent source language. Then, we propose to detect the manipulation chain through learning the mapping from the source language to the target one under a machine translation framework. Our method can detect manipulation chains consisting of up to five operations, and we obtain promising results on both the short-chain detection and the long-chain detection.