# PatchCraft: Exploring Texture Patch for Efficient AI-generated Image Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 122 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (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)
- [Vector Quantized Diffusion Model for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14822/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05396/) (2016)
- [Leveraging Frequency Analysis for Deep Fake Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08685/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Fake Image Detectors that Generalize Across Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10174/) (2023)
- [DIRE for Diffusion-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09295/) (2023)
- [GenImage: A Million-Scale Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08571/) (2023)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [Deep Video Portraits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11714/) (2018)
- [Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01856/) (2021)
- [Global Texture Enhancement for Fake Face Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00133/) (2020)
- [MirrorGAN: Learning Text-to-image Generation by Redescription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05854/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 122)

- [Detecting Multimedia Generated by Large AI Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00045/) (2024)
- [Dual Data Alignment Makes AI-Generated Image Detector Easier Generalizable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14359/) (2025)
- [Any-Resolution AI-Generated Image Detection by Spectral Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19417/) (2024)
- [Is Artificial Intelligence Generated Image Detection a Solved Problem?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12335/) (2025)
- [FIRE: Robust Detection of Diffusion-Generated Images via Frequency-Guided Reconstruction Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07140/) (2024)
- [A Single Simple Patch is All You Need for AI-generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01123/) (2024)
- [CO-SPY: Combining Semantic and Pixel Features to Detect Synthetic Images by AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18286/) (2025)
- [FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13306/) (2024)
- [Ivy-Fake: A Unified Explainable Framework and Benchmark for Image and Video AIGC Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00979/) (2025)
- [AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02664/) (2025)
- [All Patches Matter, More Patches Better: Enhance AI-Generated Image Detection via Panoptic Patch Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01396/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Ideal and Real-world Evaluation: Benchmarking AI-Generated Image Detection in Challenging Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09172/) (2025)
- [TGIF: Text-Guided Inpainting Forgery Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11566/) (2024)
- [Toward Generalizable Forgery Detection and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21210/) (2025)
- [Your One-Stop Solution for AI-Generated Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11035/) (2026)
- [How well are open sourced AI-generated image detection models out-of-the-box: A comprehensive benchmark study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07814/) (2026)
- [SIDBench: A Python Framework for Reliably Assessing Synthetic Image Detection Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18552/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Learner Generalizes Across AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08763/) (2025)
- [Survey on AI-Generated Media Detection: From Non-MLLM to MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05240/) (2025)
- [Methods and Trends in Detecting AI-Generated Images: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15176/) (2025)
- [FakeScope: Large Multimodal Expert Model for Transparent AI-Generated Image Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24267/) (2025)
- [LOTA: Bit-Planes Guided AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14230/) (2025)
- [TextureCrop: Enhancing Synthetic Image Detection through Texture-based Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15500/) (2024)
- [UniShield: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Unified Forgery Image Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03161/) (2025)
- [Evolution of Detection Performance throughout the Online Lifespan of Synthetic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11541/) (2024)
- [NS-Net: Decoupling CLIP Semantic Information through NULL-Space for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01248/) (2025)
- [Detecting Origin Attribution for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19653/) (2024)
- [ThinkFake: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for AI-Generated Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19841/) (2025)
- [AvatarShield: Visual Reinforcement Learning for Human-Centric Synthetic Video Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15173/) (2025)
- [Few-Shot Synthetic Image Attribution: Identifying Unseen Generators with Limited Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25682/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent generative models show impressive performance in generating photographic images. Humans can hardly distinguish such incredibly realistic-looking AI-generated images from real ones. AI-generated images may lead to ubiquitous disinformation dissemination. Therefore, it is of utmost urgency to develop a detector to identify AI generated images. Most existing detectors suffer from sharp performance drops over unseen generative models. In this paper, we propose a novel AI-generated image detector capable of identifying fake images created by a wide range of generative models. We observe that the texture patches of images tend to reveal more traces left by generative models compared to the global semantic information of the images. A novel Smash&Reconstruction preprocessing is proposed to erase the global semantic information and enhance texture patches. Furthermore, pixels in rich texture regions exhibit more significant fluctuations than those in poor texture regions. Synthesizing realistic rich texture regions proves to be more challenging for existing generative models. Based on this principle, we leverage the inter-pixel correlation contrast between rich and poor texture regions within an image to further boost the detection performance. In addition, we build a comprehensive AI-generated image detection benchmark, which includes 17 kinds of prevalent generative models, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing baselines and our approach. Our benchmark provides a leaderboard for follow-up studies. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Our project: https://fdmas.github.io/AIGCDetect