# A Benchmark & Dataset for Detecting AI-Manipulated Visual Evidence in the Court System

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37783 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37783/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08971/) (2019)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Celeb-DF: A Large-scale Challenging Dataset for DeepFake Forensics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12962/) (2019)
- [ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05630/) (2021)
- [OpenForensics: Large-Scale Challenging Dataset For Multi-Face Forgery Detection And Segmentation In-The-Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14480/) (2021)
- [Testing Human Ability To Detect Deepfake Images of Human Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05056/) (2022)
- [How good are humans at detecting AI-generated images? Learnings from an experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18640/) (2025)
- [DetectZoo: A Unified Toolkit for AI-Generated Content Detection Across Text, Audio, and Image Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04205/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photographic evidence is becoming increasingly vulnerable to forms of alteration and fabrication that existing legal and technical workflows are not well equipped to evaluate. Surveillance frames, dashcam stills, and phone photographs may be used to establish presence, sequence, causation, damage, or identity, yet contemporary generative systems allow non-experts to alter or fabricate such images through ordinary prompt-based interfaces. Existing image-forensics benchmarks provide important resources for face manipulation, classical tampering, and general synthetic-image detection, but they are not organized around the forms of visual evidence submitted in courts, the localized edits that can change what an exhibit appears to prove, or the consumer-tool threat model now facing the justice system. We introduce the CIFAR Synthetic Evidence Corpus for Detecting AI-Manipulated Images, a benchmark for evidentiary image authentication in court and justice-system contexts. The corpus contains 1,505 photographic items, including 720 authentic controls and 785 manipulated or fabricated images, spanning surveillance, dashcam, and consumer-photo imagery. Manipulations are organized into scene-condition edits, localized element edits, and full fabrications produced with contemporary generative systems. Each item is released with structured metadata covering source provenance, manipulation tier, subtype, generator, prompt template, and scene attributes, enabling controlled evaluation beyond aggregate binary detection. We also establish baselines with publicly available image-manipulation detectors, showing that current systems exhibit error profiles that remain problematic for evidentiary use. The dataset, prompts, metadata, code, and baseline evaluation scripts are released to support research on visual evidence authentication, information integrity, and trustworthy AI for the justice system.