Attention-Guided Cross-Connected Filters Convolutional Neural Network with Surrogate-Based Interpretability for Image Splicing Forgery Detection

Background: Image splicing forgery detection is one of the most challenging problems in the field of image forensics as it involves identifying and localizing suspicious regions that are created by integrating contents from one or more different sources. The accurate detection and classification of splicing forgery still remains a difficult task because of the existence of overlapping image regions, which makes it complex to differentiate authentic and tampered images. This overlap causes a lack of feature representation, making it difficult to precisely detect the tampering in images. Also, the decision-making process of the model is often a black box, which makes it challenging to interpret and understand the rationale behind its decisions. Methods: To address these challenges, a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM)–U-Net with Cross-Connected Filters–Convolutional Neural Network (CCF-CNN) is proposed to achieve precise detection and localization of spliced regions. The CBAM enhances spatial and channel-wise attention, enabling accurate localization of forged regions. The dual-phase CCF-CNN is incorporated with cross-connected filters to differentiate between the authentic and tampered regions by extracting global and local features. Additionally, a surrogate heatmap mechanism is introduced using intermediate decoder features to generate patch-level visual explanations, enabling precise localization of the spliced regions, thereby improving the model’s transparency in decision-making. Results: The proposed CCF-CNN obtains a high accuracy of 99.84% on the CASIA 2.0 dataset and an accuracy of 95.63% on the MISD. Conclusions: Compared to traditional CNNs such as VGG, ResNet and attention-based interpretability algorithms, the proposed model obtains higher performance in terms of detection and interpretability.