About Me
I’m a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Lehigh University focused on computer vision—especially media fornesics, image analysis and manipulation detection. My current work has been focussed on the high level ascepts of media foreniscs. considering human attention and semantic meaning, while generating image manipulation datasets that reflect real-world distributions. My skills including proficiency with VLMs, stable diffusion inpainting and editing methods, image comparison metrics, human studies and forgery and detection methods.
Publications
Abstract While neural compression has the potential to revolutionize image compression, recent studies have emphasized its ability to introduce subtle artifacts that could alter the image content. Concerned about the impact of such modifications on scientific images, this work explores the potential effects of neural compression on these images, focusing on two critical aspects: semantic understanding and forensic integrity. We use scientific image datasets to assess the performance of neural compression techniques on Visual Question Answering (VQA) and copy-move forgery detection tasks. Our findings indicate that the subtle changes introduced by neural compression do not significantly degrade the performance of state-ofthe-art solutions. In the experiments, neurally compressed images sufficiently preserved the original semantics and forensic traces. Moreover, compared to lossy techniques, e.g., JPEG compression, at similar bit-per-pixel (bpp) rates, neural compression demonstrates a superior ability to preserve both semantic content and forensic traces, even at high compression levels. Our results suggest that neural compression may provide a viable alternative to lossy compression for scientific images.
Abstract The social media-fuelled explosion of fake news and misinformation supported by tampered images has led to growth in the development of models and datasets for image manipulation detection. However, existing detection methods mostly treat media objects in isolation, without considering the impact of specific manipulations on viewer perception. Forensic datasets are usually analyzed based on the manipulation operations and corresponding pixel-based masks, but not on the semantics of the manipulation, i.e., type of scene, objects, and viewers' attention to scene content. The semantics of the manipulation play an important role in spreading misinformation through manipulated images. In an attempt to encourage further development of semantic-aware forensic approaches to understand visual misinformation, we propose a framework to analyze the trends of visual and semantic saliency in popular image manipulation datasets and their impact on detection.