Abstract:The rapid adoption of diffusion and large-scale generative models has made it increasingly challenging to distinguish synthetic imagery from real photographs. While automated detectors have been proposed, their generalization to unseen generators remains brittle. To address this limitation, we investigate inter-channel color correlations, a lightweight and underexploited forensic cue. We first demonstrate that LPIPS, a widely used perceptual metric, exhibits inconsistent responses to perturbations that selectively alter channel dependence across different color-space parameterizations, indicating that cross-channel statistics are not uniformly constrained by common perceptual training objectives. Motivated by this, we analyze the distributions of pairwise inter-channel correlation features across multiple color spaces. Our analysis reveals systematic, generator-specific differences in these distributions, with RGB and Lab color spaces providing the most apparent separation between real and generated images. Building on this, we introduce Chroma, a detector of AI-generated images which augments standard RGB inputs with inter-channel correlation maps and employs a fixed CNN backbone trained with a modest computational budget. We assess its robustness under both single-generator training and a limited multi-generator supervision regime, where only a few samples from additional generators are available. Across a standard benchmark protocol, correlation-augmented inputs improve real-vs-generated discrimination and robustness, yielding performance competitive with recent detectors while maintaining a simple architecture and training procedure. Code is available at https://github.com/JPSoteloSilva/CHROMA
Abstract:In this paper, we introduce PhotoHolmes, an open-source Python library designed to easily run and benchmark forgery detection methods on digital images. The library includes implementations of popular and state-of-the-art methods, dataset integration tools, and evaluation metrics. Utilizing the Benchmark tool in PhotoHolmes, users can effortlessly compare various methods. This facilitates an accurate and reproducible comparison between their own methods and those in the existing literature. Furthermore, PhotoHolmes includes a command-line interface (CLI) to easily run the methods implemented in the library on any suspicious image. As such, image forgery methods become more accessible to the community. The library has been built with extensibility and modularity in mind, which makes adding new methods, datasets and metrics to the library a straightforward process. The source code is available at https://github.com/photoholmes/photoholmes.