Deep Learning Methods for Event Verification and Image Repurposing Detection

The authenticity of images posted on social media is an issue of growing concern. Many algorithms have been developed to detect manipulated images, but few have investigated the ability of deep neural network based approaches to verify the authenticity of image labels, such as event names. In this paper, we propose several novel methods to predict if an image was captured at one of several noteworthy events. We use a set of images from several recorded events such as storms, marathons, protests, and other large public gatherings. Two strategies of applying pre-trained Imagenet network for event verification are presented, with two modifications for each strategy. The first method uses the features from the last convolutional layer of a pre-trained network as input to a classifier. We also consider the effects of tuning the convolutional weights of the pre-trained network to improve classification. The second method combines many features extracted from smaller scales and uses the output of a pre-trained network as the input to a second classifier. For both methods, we investigated several different classifiers and tested many different pre-trained networks. Our experiments demonstrate both these approaches are effective for event verification and image re-purposing detection. The classification at the global scale tends to marginally outperform our tested local methods and fine tuning the network further improves the results.