Edge-aware Regional Message Passing Controller for Image Forgery Localization

Digital image authenticity has promoted research on image forgery localization. Although deep learning-based methods achieve remarkable progress, most of them usually suffer from severe feature coupling between the forged and authentic regions. In this work, we propose a two-step Edge-aware Regional Message Passing Controlling strategy to address the above issue. Specifically, the first step is to account for fully exploiting the edge information. It consists of two core designs: context-enhanced graph construction and threshold-adaptive differentiable binarization edge algorithm. The former assembles the global semantic information to distinguish the features between the forged and authentic regions, while the latter stands on the output of the former to provide the learnable edges. In the second step, guided by the learnable edges, a region message passing controller is devised to weaken the message passing between the forged and authentic regions. In this way, our ERMPC is capable of explicitly modeling the inconsistency between the forged and authentic regions and enabling it to perform well on refined forged images. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art image forgery localization methods qualitatively and quantitatively.