# Are GAN generated images easy to detect? A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02617 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02617/

## Key facts

- Cited by 139 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Detecting and Simulating Artifacts in GAN Fake Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06515/) (2019)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [What makes fake images detectable? Understanding properties that generalize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10588/) (2020)
- [Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06564/) (2020)
- [Do GANs leave artificial fingerprints?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11842/) (2018)
- [Detecting GAN generated Fake Images using Co-occurrence Matrices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06836/) (2019)
- [ForensicTransfer: Weakly-supervised Domain Adaptation for Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02510/) (2018)
- [Incremental learning for the detection and classification of GAN-generated images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01568/) (2019)
- [RelGAN: Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation via Relative Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07269/) (2019)
- [CNN Detection of GAN-Generated Face Images based on Cross-Band Co-occurrences Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12909/) (2020)
- [On the generalization of GAN image forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11153/) (2019)
- [Identification of Deep Network Generated Images Using Disparities in Color Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07276/) (2018)
- [Towards Generalizable Deepfake Detection with Locality-aware AutoEncoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05999/) (2019)
- [A Full-Image Full-Resolution End-to-End-Trainable CNN Framework for Image Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06751/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 139)

- [The Stable Signature: Rooting Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15435/) (2023)
- [On the detection of synthetic images generated by diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00680/) (2022)
- [Raising the Bar of AI-generated Image Detection with CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00195/) (2023)
- [AEROBLADE: Training-Free Detection of Latent Diffusion Images Using Autoencoder Reconstruction Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17879/) (2024)
- [Intriguing properties of synthetic images: from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06408/) (2023)
- [PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12397/) (2023)
- [Towards the Detection of Diffusion Model Deepfakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14571/) (2022)
- [Fusing Global and Local Features for Generalized AI-Synthesized Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13964/) (2022)
- [Can ChatGPT Detect DeepFakes? A Study of Using Multimodal Large Language Models for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14077/) (2024)
- [A Bias-Free Training Paradigm for More General AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17671/) (2024)
- [Data Feedback Loops: Model-driven Amplification of Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03942/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Detection of AI-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15875/) (2024)
- [Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection via Language-guided Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13800/) (2023)
- [CLIPping the Deception: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Universal Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12927/) (2024)
- [Detecting GAN-generated Images by Orthogonal Training of Multiple CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02246/) (2022)
- [AutoSplice: A Text-prompt Manipulated Image Dataset for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06870/) (2023)
- [Fake or JPEG? Revealing Common Biases in Generated Image Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17608/) (2024)
- [On Learning Multi-Modal Forgery Representation for Diffusion Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23623/) (2024)
- [FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13306/) (2024)
- [RIGID: A Training-free and Model-Agnostic Framework for Robust AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20112/) (2024)
- [Aligned Datasets Improve Detection of Latent Diffusion-Generated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11835/) (2024)
- [ArtiFact: A Large-Scale Dataset with Artificial and Factual Images for Generalizable and Robust Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11970/) (2023)
- [GAN-generated Faces Detection: A Survey and New Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07145/) (2022)
- [Deep Image Fingerprint: Towards Low Budget Synthetic Image Detection and Model Lineage Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10762/) (2023)
- [Parents and Children: Distinguishing Multimodal DeepFakes from Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00500/) (2023)
- [LaWa: Using Latent Space for In-Generation Image Watermarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05868/) (2024)
- [Nepotistically Trained Generative-AI Models Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12202/) (2023)
- [Contrasting Deepfakes Diffusion via Contrastive Learning and Global-Local Similarities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20337/) (2024)
- [Towards Universal GAN Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12606/) (2021)
- [GLFF: Global and Local Feature Fusion for AI-synthesized Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08615/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The advent of deep learning has brought a significant improvement in the quality of generated media. However, with the increased level of photorealism, synthetic media are becoming hardly distinguishable from real ones, raising serious concerns about the spread of fake or manipulated information over the Internet. In this context, it is important to develop automated tools to reliably and timely detect synthetic media. In this work, we analyze the state-of-the-art methods for the detection of synthetic images, highlighting the key ingredients of the most successful approaches, and comparing their performance over existing generative architectures. We will devote special attention to realistic and challenging scenarios, like media uploaded on social networks or generated by new and unseen architectures, analyzing the impact of suitable augmentation and training strategies on the detectors' generalization ability.