An Intelligent Forensics Approach for Detecting Patch-Based Image Inpainting

Image inpainting algorithms have a wide range of applications, which can be used for object removal in digital images. With the development of semantic level image inpainting technology, this brings great challenges to blind image forensics. In this case, many conventional methods have been proposed which have disadvantages such as high time complexity and low robustness to postprocessing operations. Therefore, this paper proposes a mask regional convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN) approach for patch-based inpainting detection. According to the current research, many deep learning methods have shown the capacity for segmentation tasks when labeled datasets are available, so we apply a deep neural network to the domain of inpainting forensics. This deep learning model can distinguish and obtain different features between the inpainted and noninpainted regions. To reduce the missed detection areas and improve detection accuracy, we also adjust the sizes of the anchor scales due to the inpainting images and replace the original nonmaximum suppression single threshold with an improved nonmaximum suppression (NMS). The experimental results demonstrate this intelligent method has better detection performance over recent approaches of image inpainting forensics.