Definition
Plain language
Software that inspects a photo and tries to tell whether it has been tampered with.
As stated in the literature
Pixel-forensics models trained on splicing, copy-move, and compression inconsistencies; they generalize poorly to diffusion-based region re-rendering, which leaves none of those low-level traces.
Also called: forgery detection, forgery detector, image forgery detector
Why it matters: These tools are the standard check on whether a picture can be trusted, so the fact that they miss AI-redrawn regions leaves a real gap in verification.
For example, a tool flags a news photo because the lighting and grain in one corner don't match the rest of the frame.
Heard on the show
“An image-forgery detector was shown a batch of doctored photographs, and it flagged under four percent of them.”Episode 247 — One Edited Photo, an Honest Caption, and a RAG System That Believes It