# Handcrafted Feature Fusion for Reliable Detection of AI-Generated Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19262 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19262/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot... for now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11035/) (2019)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [Exposing DeepFake Videos By Detecting Face Warping Artifacts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00656/) (2018)
- [Watch your Up-Convolution: CNN Based Generative Deep Neural Networks are Failing to Reproduce Spectral Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01826/) (2020)
- [The Creation and Detection of Deepfakes: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11138/) (2020)
- [DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00179/) (2020)
- [DeepFakes: a New Threat to Face Recognition? Assessment and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08685/) (2018)
- [Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06564/) (2020)
- [Two-branch Recurrent Network for Isolating Deepfakes in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03412/) (2020)
- [Are GAN generated images easy to detect? A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02617/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid progress of generative models has enabled the creation of highly realistic synthetic images, raising concerns about authenticity and trust in digital media. Detecting such fake content reliably is an urgent challenge. While deep learning approaches dominate current literature, handcrafted features remain attractive for their interpretability, efficiency, and generalizability. In this paper, we conduct a systematic evaluation of handcrafted descriptors, including raw pixels, color histograms, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), and wavelet features, on the CIFAKE dataset of real versus synthetic images. Using 50,000 training and 10,000 test samples, we benchmark seven classifiers ranging from Logistic Regression to advanced gradient-boosted ensembles (LightGBM, XGBoost, CatBoost). Results demonstrate that LightGBM consistently outperforms alternatives, achieving PR-AUC 0.9879, ROC-AUC 0.9878, F1 0.9447, and a Brier score of 0.0414 with mixed features, representing strong gains in calibration and discrimination over simpler descriptors. Across three configurations (baseline, advanced, mixed), performance improves monotonically, confirming that combining diverse handcrafted features yields substantial benefit. These findings highlight the continued relevance of carefully engineered features and ensemble learning for detecting synthetic images, particularly in contexts where interpretability and computational efficiency are critical.