Using Neural Networks for Fake Colorized Image Detection

Modern colorization techniques can create artificially-colorized images that are indistinguishable from natural color images. As a result, the detection of fake colorized images is attracting the interest of the digital forensics research community. This chapter tackles the challenge by introducing a detection approach that leverages neural networks. It analyzes the statistical differences between fake colorized images and their corresponding natural images, and shows that significant differences exist. A simple, but effective, feature extraction technique is proposed that utilizes cosine similarity to measure the overall similarity of normalized histogram distributions of various channels for natural and fake images. A special neural network with a simple structure but good performance is trained to detect fake colorized images. Experiments with datasets containing fake colorized images generated by three state-of-the-art colorization techniques demonstrate the performance and robustness of the proposed approach.