Transformer-Auxiliary Neural Networks for Image Manipulation Localization by Operator Inductions

Image manipulation localization (IML), which seeks to accurately segment tampered regions that are artfully fastened into a normal image, is a fundamental yet challenging computer vision task. Despite that impressive results have been achieved by some progressive deep learning methods, they usually fail in capturing the subtle manipulation artifacts at different object scales, which are not competent to generate a perfect segmentation mask with complete and fine object structures. Besides, the problem of coarse boundaries also occurs frequently. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Transformer-Auxiliary by operator-induced neural Network (TANet) to localize forged regions for IML. Specifically, a stacked multi-scale transformer (SMT) branch is first introduced as a compensation for feature representations of the mainstream convolutional neural network branch. SMT can detect structured abnormalities of the input image at multi-levels by operating on patches of different sizes. Then TANet explicitly exploits an operator induction module (OIM) to excavate valuable and manipulated region-related boundary semantics to guide the representative learning of the mainstream branch. The OIM encourages the network to generate features that highlight object structure, thereby promoting precise boundary localization of forged regions. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and settings to validate the effectiveness of TANet. Results show that TANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin under widely-used evaluation metrics.