VIPPrint: A Large Scale Dataset of Printed and Scanned Images for Synthetic Face Images Detection and Source Linking

TL;DR

This paper introduces VIPPrint, a large-scale dataset of printed and scanned face images, to advance forensic analysis and source linking of synthetic and manipulated images, highlighting current method limitations.

Contribution

The paper provides a new extensive dataset for printed and scanned face images and evaluates existing methods, revealing their shortcomings in this domain.

Findings

State-of-the-art synthetic face detectors fail on printed and scanned images.

The dataset enables benchmarking and development of more robust forensic algorithms.

Experiments highlight the need for specialized methods for printed and scanned image analysis.

Abstract

The possibility of carrying out a meaningful forensics analysis on printed and scanned images plays a major role in many applications. First of all, printed documents are often associated with criminal activities, such as terrorist plans, child pornography pictures, and even fake packages. Additionally, printing and scanning can be used to hide the traces of image manipulation or the synthetic nature of images, since the artifacts commonly found in manipulated and synthetic images are gone after the images are printed and scanned. A problem hindering research in this area is the lack of large scale reference datasets to be used for algorithm development and benchmarking. Motivated by this issue, we present a new dataset composed of a large number of synthetic and natural printed face images. To highlight the difficulties associated with the analysis of the images of the dataset, we carried out an extensive set of experiments comparing several printer attribution methods. We also verified that state-of-the-art methods to distinguish natural and synthetic face images fail when applied to print and scanned images. We envision that the availability of the new dataset and the preliminary experiments we carried out will motivate and facilitate further research in this area.