# GCA-Net : Utilizing Gated Context Attention for Improving Image Forgery Localization and Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04298 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04298/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Attention U-Net: Learning Where to Look for the Pancreas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03999/) (2018)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [On the Detection of Digital Face Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01717/) (2019)
- [GaAN: Gated Attention Networks for Learning on Large and Spatiotemporal Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07294/) (2018)
- [Learning Rich Features for Image Manipulation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04953/) (2018)
- [PSCC-Net: Progressive Spatio-Channel Correlation Network for Image Manipulation Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10596/) (2021)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [Noiseprint: a CNN-based camera model fingerprint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08396/) (2018)
- [Image Manipulation Detection by Multi-View Multi-Scale Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06832/) (2021)
- [SPAN: Spatial Pyramid Attention Network forImage Manipulation Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00726/) (2020)
- [Recalibrating Fully Convolutional Networks with Spatial and Channel 'Squeeze & Excitation' Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08127/) (2018)
- [Hybrid LSTM and Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Detection of Image Forgeries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02495/) (2019)
- [Generate, Segment and Refine: Towards Generic Manipulation Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09729/) (2018)
- [Constrained R-CNN: A general image manipulation detection model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08217/) (2019)
- [Deep Matching and Validation Network -- An End-to-End Solution to Constrained Image Splicing Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09765/) (2017)
- [Detection and Localization of Image Forgeries using Resampling Features and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00433/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [AutoSplice: A Text-prompt Manipulated Image Dataset for Media Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06870/) (2023)
- [Weakly-supervised deepfake localization in diffusion-generated images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04584/) (2023)
- [DeCLIP: Decoding CLIP representations for deepfake localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08849/) (2024)
- [All-in-one Weather-degraded Image Restoration via Adaptive Degradation-aware Self-prompting Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07445/) (2024)
- [Passive Deepfake Detection Across Multi-modalities: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17911/) (2024)
- [HazeFlow: Revisit Haze Physical Model as ODE and Non-Homogeneous Haze Generation for Real-World Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18190/) (2025)
- [Dense Feature Interaction Network for Image Inpainting Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02191/) (2024)
- [From Scarcity to Capability: Empowering Fake News Detection in Low-Resource Languages with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09604/) (2025)
- [Generalized Deepfakes Detection with Reconstructed-Blended Images and Multi-scale Feature Reconstruction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08020/) (2023)
- [PRISM: Rethinking Atmospheric Scattering Reconstruction as a Unified Understanding and Restoration Model for Real-world Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07048/) (2026)
- [A Synthetic-to-Real Dehazing Method based on Domain Unification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05374/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Forensic analysis of manipulated pixels requires the identification of various hidden and subtle features from images. Conventional image recognition models generally fail at this task because they are biased and more attentive toward the dominant local and spatial features. In this paper, we propose a novel Gated Context Attention Network (GCA-Net) that utilizes non-local attention in conjunction with a gating mechanism in order to capture the finer image discrepancies and better identify forged regions. The proposed framework uses high dimensional embeddings to filter and aggregate the relevant context from coarse feature maps at various stages of the decoding process. This improves the network's understanding of global differences and reduces false-positive localizations. Our evaluation on standard image forensic benchmarks shows that GCA-Net can both compete against and improve over state-of-the-art networks by an average of 4.7% AUC. Additional ablation studies also demonstrate the method's robustness against attributions and resilience to false-positive predictions.