On the usage of wavelet-based techniques for Synthetic Image Detection

Abstract

With the rise of zero-shot synthetic image generation models, such as Stability.ai's Stable Diffusion, OpenAI's DALLE or Google's Imagen, the need for powerful tools to detect synthetic generated images has never been higher. In this thesis we contribute to this goal by considering wavelet-based approaches for synthetic image detection.

We will introduce multi-level discrete wavelet transform, which to the best of our knowledge has never been considered for this goal prior to this work. A similar approach that has been considered for the goal of synthetic image detection, is the multi-level wavelet packet transform used by Wolter et al. We will show that not only is our proposed approach more efficient and easier interpretable, it also performs better in a number of experimental settings and therefore forms a suitable addition to the toolset for the detection of synthetic images.

Moreover, we will try and generalize performance of our used classifiers to out-of-dataset samples and see that our used classifier in general does not allow for such generalization. Finally, we will discuss the challenges of this work and offer interesting directions for further research.