The growing prevalence of tampered images poses serious security threats, highlighting the urgent need for reliable detection methods. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong potential in analyzing tampered images and generating interpretations. However, they still struggle with identifying micro-level artifacts, exhibit low accuracy in localizing tampered text regions, and heavily rely on expensive annotations for forgery interpretation. To this end, we introduce TextShield-R1, the first reinforcement learning based MLLM solution for tampered text detection and reasoning. Specifically, our approach introduces Forensic Continual pre-training, an easy-to-hard curriculum that well prepares the MLLM for tampered text detection by harnessing the large-scale cheap data from natural image forensic and OCR tasks. During fine-tuning, we perform Group Relative Policy Optimization with novel reward functions to reduce annotation dependency and improve reasoning capabilities. At inference time, we enhance localization accuracy via OCR Rectification, a method that leverages the MLLM’s strong text recognition abilities to refine its predictions. Furthermore, to support rigorous evaluation, we introduce Text Forensics Reasoning (TFR) benchmark, comprising over 45k real and tampered images across 16 languages, 10 tampering techniques, and diverse domains. Rich reasoning-style annotations are included, allowing for comprehensive assessment. Our TFR benchmark simultaneously addresses seven major limitations of existing benchmarks and enables robust evaluation under cross-style, cross-method, and cross-language conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TextShield-R1 significantly advances the state of the art in interpretable tampered text detection.

The rapid advancements of generative AI have fueled the potential of generative text image editing, meanwhile escalating the threat of misinformation spreading. However, existing forensics methods struggle to detect unseen forgery types that they have not been trained on, underscoring the need for a model capable of generalized detection of tampered scene text. To tackle this, we propose a novel task: open-set tampered scene text detection, which evaluates forensics models on their ability to identify both seen and previously unseen forgery types. We have curated a comprehensive, high-quality dataset, featuring the texts tampered by eight text editing models, to thoroughly assess the open-set generalization capabilities. Further, we introduce a novel and effective pre-training paradigm that subtly alters the texture of selected texts within an image and trains the model to identify these regions. This approach not only mitigates the scarcity of high-quality training data but also enhances models' fine-grained perception and open-set generalization abilities. Additionally, we present DAF, a novel framework that improves open-set generalization by distinguishing between the features of authentic and tampered text, rather than focusing solely on the tampered text's features. Our extensive experiments validate the remarkable efficacy of our methods. For example, our zero-shot performance can even beat the previous state-of-the-art full-shot model by a large margin.

The field of Fake Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) is highly fragmented, encompassing four domains: deepfake detection (Deepfake), image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL), artificial intelligence-generated image detection (AIGC), and document image manipulation localization (Doc). Although individual benchmarks exist in some domains, a unified benchmark for all domains in FIDL remains blank. The absence of a unified benchmark results in significant domain silos, where each domain independently constructs its datasets, models, and evaluation protocols without interoperability, preventing cross-domain comparisons and hindering the development of the entire FIDL field. To close the domain silo barrier, we propose ForensicHub, the first unified benchmark & codebase for all-domain fake image detection and localization. Considering drastic variations on dataset, model, and evaluation configurations across all domains, as well as the scarcity of open-sourced baseline models and the lack of individual benchmarks in some domains, ForensicHub: i) proposes a modular and configuration-driven architecture that decomposes forensic pipelines into interchangeable components across datasets, transforms, models, and evaluators, allowing flexible composition across all domains; ii) fully implements 10 baseline models (3 of which are reproduced from scratch), 6 backbones, 2 new benchmarks for AIGC and Doc, and integrates 2 existing benchmarks of DeepfakeBench and IMDLBenCo through an adapter-based design; iii) establishes an image forensic fusion protocol evaluation mechanism that supports unified training and testing of diverse forensic models across tasks; iv) conducts indepth analysis based on the ForensicHub, offering 8 key actionable insights into FIDL model architecture, dataset characteristics, and evaluation standards. Specifically, ForensicHub includes 4 forensic tasks, 23 datasets, 42 baseline models, 6 backbones, 11 GPU-accelerated pixel- and image-level evaluation metrics, and realizes 16 kinds of cross-domain evaluations. ForensicHub represents a significant leap forward in breaking the domain silos in the FIDL field and inspiring future breakthroughs. Code is available at: https://github.com/scu-zjz/ForensicHub.

In recent years, image manipulation localization has attracted increasing attention due to its pivotal role in guaranteeing social media security. However, how to accurately identify the forged regions remains an open challenge. One of the main bottlenecks lies in the severe scarcity of high-quality data, due to its costly creation process. To address this limitation, we propose a novel paradigm, termed as CAAA, to automatically and precisely annotate the numerous manually forged images from the web at the pixel level. We further propose a novel metric QES to facilitate the automatic filtering of unreliable annotations. With CAAA and QES, we construct a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset comprising 123,150 manually forged images with mask annotations. Besides, we develop a new model APSC-Net for accurate image manipulation localization. According to extensive experiments, our dataset significantly improves the performance of various models on the widely-used benchmarks and such improvements are attributed to our proposed effective methods. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/qcf-568/MIML.

Recently, tampered text detection in document image has attracted increasingly attention due to its essential role on information security. However, detecting visually consistent tampered text in photographed document images is still a main challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to capture more fine-grained clues in complex scenarios for tampered text detection, termed as Document Tampering Detector (DTD), which consists of a Frequency Perception Head (FPH) to compensate the deficiencies caused by the inconspicuous visual features, and a Multi-view Iterative Decoder (MID) for fully utilizing the information of features in different scales. In addition, we design a new training paradigm, termed as Curriculum Learning for Tampering Detection (CLTD), which can address the confusion during the training procedure and thus to improve the robustness for image compression and the ability to generalize. To further facilitate the tampered text detection in document images, we construct a large-scale document image dataset, termed as DocTamper, which contains 170,000 document images of various types. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed DTD outperforms previous state-of-the-art by 9.2%, 26.3% and 12.3% in terms of F-measure on the DocTamper testing set, and the crossdomain testing sets of DocTamper-FCD and DocTamper-SCD, respectively. Codes and dataset will be available at https://github.com/qcf-568/DocTamper.