The proliferation of the tampered images on social media can pose serious societal risks, influencing public opinion and causing panic. Image Manipulation Localization technique has advanced to address this, but some methods focus on microscopic traces, overlooking macroscopic semantics that deceive viewers. To address this problem, we propose a novel Image Manipulation Localization framework called Collaborative Transformers (Co-Transformers), designed to fully explore and utilize the collaborative information between macroscopic semantics and microscopic traces. This framework is based on two Vision Transformer variants. The first variant captures the semantic logic of the image. The second variant delves into microscopic tampering traces. By dynamically fusing these two complementary features, the framework enables interaction between macroscopic semantic inconsistencies and microscopic abnormal traces, effectively coordinating their relationship in the latent space. Furthermore, we introduce a new Multi-Level Forensic Attention (MLF-Attention) mechanism to enhance the model's ability to extract various tampered traces, this mechanism can be integrated into our framework. Compared with existing methods, our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results in localization accuracy and shows good robustness against various attacks.

Quantum computing poses a formidable threat to classical cryptographic systems, particularly those safeguarding blockchain-based transactions and user privacy. Conventional algorithms such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography are vulnerable to quantum attacks through Shor's and Grover's algorithms, jeopardizing the long-term security of digital assets. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Lightweight Lattice-based Privacy Protection (LLPP) blockchain framework that integrates lattice-based digital signatures with a double encryption mechanism. The framework is designed to provide post-quantum security for transaction authentication while enhancing payment address privacy and reducing direct linkage under public observation, even in the presence of quantum-capable adversaries. A key challenge in deploying lattice-based cryptography on blockchain systems is the substantial storage overhead of signatures and public keys. LLPP addresses this by leveraging the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for off-chain storage, recording only 46-byte content identifiers on-chain while maintaining full verifiability. Comprehensive evaluations on the Substrate platform demonstrate that LLPP provides practical post-quantum authentication and privacy protection with signing and verification latencies below 2 milliseconds, making it practical for deployment in quantum-secure blockchain environments.

As artificial intelligence advances rapidly, particularly with the advent of GANs and diffusion models, the accuracy of Image Inpainting Localization (IIL) has become increasingly challenging. Current IIL methods face two main challenges: a tendency towards overconfidence, leading to incorrect predictions; and difficulty in detecting subtle tampering boundaries in inpainted images. In response, we propose a new paradigm that treats IIL as a conditional mask generation task utilizing diffusion models. Our method, InpDiffusion, utilizes the denoising process enhanced by the integration of image semantic conditions to progressively refine predictions. During denoising, we employ edge conditions and introduce a novel edge supervision strategy to enhance the model's perception of edge details in inpainted objects. Balancing the diffusion model's stochastic sampling with edge supervision of tampered image regions mitigates the risk of incorrect predictions from overconfidence and prevents the loss of subtle boundaries that can result from overly stochastic processes. Furthermore, we propose an innovative Dual-stream Multi-scale Feature Extractor (DMFE) for extracting multi-scale features, enhancing feature representation by considering both semantic and edge conditions of the inpainted images. Extensive experiments across challenging datasets demonstrate that the InpDiffusion significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in IIL tasks, while also showcasing excellent generalization capabilities and robustness.

Generative Image Tampering (GIT), due to its high diversity and realism, poses a significant challenge to traditional image tampering localization techniques. Consequently, this paper introduces a denoising diffusion probabilistic model-based DcDsDiff, which comprises a Dual-View Conditional Network (DVCN) and a Dual-Stream Denoising Network (DSDN). DVCN provides clues about the tampered areas. It extracts tampering features in the high-frequency view and integrates them with spatial domain features using attention mechanisms. DSDN jointly generates mask image and detail image, enhancing the generalization capability of the model against new tampering forms through iterative denoising. A multi-stream interaction mechanism enables the two generative tasks to promote each other, prompting the model to generate localization results that are rich in detail and complete. Experiments show that DcDsDiff outperforms mainstream methods in accurate localization, generalization, extensibility, and robustness. Code page: https://github.com/QixianHao/DcDsDiff-and-GIT10K.

Current general image forgery localization (GIFL) methods confront two main challenges: decoder overconffdence causing misidentiffcation of the authentic regions or incomplete predicted masks, and limited accuracy in localizing forgery details. Recently, diffusion models have excelled as dominant approach for generative models, particularly effective in capturing complex scene details. However, their potential for GIFL remains underexplored. Therefore, we propose a GIFL framework named ForgDiffuser with diffusion models. The core of ForgDiffuser lies in leveraging diffusion models conditioned on the forgery image to efffciently generate the segmentation mask for tampered regions. Speciffcally, we introduce the attentionguided module (AGM) to aggregate and enhance image feature representations. Meanwhile, we design the boundary-driven module (BDM) with edge supervision to improve the localization accuracy of boundary details. Additionally, the probabilistic modeling and stochastic sampling mechanisms of diffusion models effectively alleviate the overconffdence issue commonly observed in traditional decoders. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that ForgDiffuser outperforms existing mainstream GIFL methods in both localization accuracy and robustness, especially under challenging manipulation conditions.

With the widespread application of Transportation Cyber Physical Systems (T-CPS), increasingly intelligent and interconnected vehicles are conducting extensive transportation activities. Compared with traditional transportation equipment, they integrate advanced information functions such as data collection, terminal communication, real-time computing, and remote coordination, which can generate and collect a large amount of real traffic data. The enormous value of these traffic data can be released through market-oriented transactions. Blockchain technology can support the transmission and collaborative control of information T-CPS, while protecting the privacy and data security of intelligent connected vehicles. This article proposes a blockchain based data trading system aimed at simplifying the transaction flow of traffic data for intelligent connected vehicle owners, while maintaining fairness, privacy, and sustainable market development. Our work introduces two key innovations: a two-stage availability verification process that reduces transaction costs while enhancing data reliability, and an efficient encryption confirmation mechanism that ensures privacy and security for data providers and buyers throughout the entire transaction lifecycle. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility and overall performance of our system through comprehensive analysis including security and reliability assessment, market behavior analysis, and computational complexity modeling, as well as practical experiments based on the Ethereum blockchain network. The evaluation results indicate that this scheme can provide privacy and security data transaction services at lower transaction costs.

To counter the security threats posed by the realism of image inpainting generated through diffusion models and GANs, in this paper, we propose a texture enhancement and progressive refinement network (TEPR-Net) for image inpainting localization (IIL). The IIL task is divided into two phases: coarse and fine locating. In the coarse locating phase, we utilize an anomaly texture encoder to capture tampering traces in textures, employ a texture–context feature interaction strategy to effectively integrate texture features with contextual features, and utilize a pixel-level contrastive learning strategy to enhance feature clustering and model generalization. In the fine locating phase, we first enhance the receptive field features in the frequency domain by transforming the features and separately enhancing the low- and high-frequency components. Then, we utilize the coarse localization result to augment the model's sensitivity to tampered regions. Additionally, we introduce a progressive edge distribution guidance and reconstruction strategy that progressively refines the edges of the tampered regions at each level, ultimately generating refined localization results. To support the research and evaluation of the IIL task, we create the Inpaint32K dataset, which is characterized by its large scale, diversity, comprehensiveness, high quality, and authenticity. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that TEPR-Net has significant advantages in terms of localization performance, generalizability, extensibility, and robustness.

Tampered images can easily be used for illegal activities, such as spreading rumors, economic fraud, fabricating false news, and illegally obtaining experience benefits, etc. With the improvement and development of artificial intelligence (AI), image manipulation technology has also been further improved, more and more retouching software in daily life adopts AI technology. So far, there is no AI-based tampered dataset. To address this challenge, we propose a dataset-IPM15K. It utilizes the most advanced image processing technology and contains a total of 150,00 doctored vital images. This dataset also could serve as a catalyst for progressing many vision tasks, e.g., localization, segmentation, and alpha-matting, etc. Additionally, we propose an effective multi-feature fusion identification network (MFI-Net) to identify these challenging images. Our model consists of four modules: the detail extraction module (DEM), which utilizes different sizes of convolutions and perceptual fields to extract more valuable information of tampered locations; the multi-branch attention fusion module (MAFM), which fully exploits contextual information of different levels to capture subtle traces of tampering; the feature decoder component (FDC), which combines fused features to identify tampered regions; and the detail enhancement block (DEB), which continues to supplement the detailed information of the detected regions. Extensive experiments on three public datasets and the proposed dataset show that MFI-Net outperforms various state-of-the-art (SOTA) manipulation detection baselines.

Recent works have shown the effectiveness of incorporating textual and visual information to tackle the sparsity problem in recommendation scenarios. To fuse these useful heterogeneous modality information, an essential prerequisite is to align these information for modality-robust features learning and semantic understanding. Unfortunately, existing works mainly focus on tackling the learning of common knowledge across modalities, while the specific characteristics of each modality is discarded, which may inevitably degrade the recommendation performance.

With the widespread use of smartphones and the rise of intelligent software, we can manipulate captured photos anytime and anywhere, so the fake photos finally obtained look “Real.” If these intelligent operation methods are maliciously applied to our daily life, then fake news, fake photos, rumors, slander, fraud, threats, and other information security issues around us can happen all the time. Today’s intelligent retouching software can make various modifications to photos, some of which do not change the content that the photos themselves want to express, such as retouching, contrast improvement, and so on. In this article, we mainly study the three operation modes of changing the authenticity of photo contents, which are Copy-move, Splicing, and Removal. Few scholars have done relevant research due to the lack of a corresponding dataset. To address this issue, we elaborately collect a novel dataset, called the multi-realistic scene manipulation dataset ( MSM30K ), which consists of 30,000 images, including three types of tampering methods, and covering 32 different tampering scenes in life. In addition, we propose a unified detection network: the efficient search and recognition network ( ESRNet ) for three tampering methods. It mainly includes four main modules: Efficient feature pyramid network ( EFPN ), Residual receptive field block with attention ( RFBA ), Hierarchical decoding identification ( HDI ), and Cascaded group-reversal attention ( GRA ) blocks. On these three datasets, ESRNet can reach 0.81 on the S-measure, 0.72 on the F-measure, and 0.85 on the E-measure. The inference speed is ~53 fps on a single GPU without I/O time. ESRNet outperforms various state-of-the-art manipulation detection baselines on three image manipulation datasets.

Sequential recommendation aims to predict users’ future behaviors given their historical interactions. However, due to the randomness and diversity of a user’s behaviors, not all historical items are informative to tell his/her next choice. It is obvious that identifying relevant items and extracting meaningful sequential patterns are necessary for a better recommendation. Unfortunately, few works have focused on this sequence denoising process. In this paper, we propose a PatteRn-enhanced ContrAstive Policy Learning Network (RAP for short) for sequential recommendation, RAP formalizes the denoising problem in the form of Markov Decision Process (MDP), and sample actions for each item to determine whether it is relevant with the target item. To tackle the lack of relevance supervision, RAP fuses a series of mined sequential patterns into the policy learning process, which work as a prior knowledge to guide the denoising process. After that, RAP splits the initial item sequence into two disjoint subsequences: a positive subsequence and a negative subsequence. At this, a novel contrastive learning mechanism is introduced to guide the sequence denoising and achieve preference estimation from the positive subsequence simultaneously. Extensive experiments on four public real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for sequential recommendation.

Double random-phase encoding- (DRPE-) based compressive sensing (CS) systems support image authentication for noisy images. When extending such systems to resource-constrained applications, how to ensure the authentication strength for noisy images becomes challenging. To tackle the issue, an efficient and secure image authentication scheme is presented. The phase information of the plain image is generated using DRPE and quantized into a binary image as the authentication information. Meanwhile, a sparser error matrix generated by the same plain image and vector quantization (VQ) image works as the input of CS. The authentication information and VQ indexes are self-hidden into the quantized measurements to construct the combined image. Then, it is permutated and diffused with the chaotic sequences generated from a modified Henon map. After decryption at the receiver side, the verifier can implement the blind authentication between the noisy decoded image and the reconstructed image. Supported by the detailed numerical simulations and theoretical analyses, the DRPE-CSVQ exhibits more powerful compression and authentication capability than its counterpart.

For sequential recommendation, it is essential to capture and predict future or long-term user preference for generating accurate recommendation over time. To improve the predictive capacity, we adopt reinforcement learning (RL) for developing effective sequential recommenders. However, user-item interaction data is likely to be sparse, complicated and time-varying. It is not easy to directly apply RL techniques to improve the performance of sequential recommendation.

In this study, the authors introduce a novel deep generative adversarial networks (GANs) model for global mosaic removal. The methods used in the proposed study consist of GANs model and a novel algorithm for maintaining and repairing (MR) images. The conventional mosaic removal algorithms all employ the correlation between the inserted pixel and its neighbouring pixels, which have a limited effect on the local mosaic removal but do not work well for the global mosaic removal. To respond to this difficulty, the authors introduce an MRGAN model with two novel parsing networks. Unlike previous GANs, the MR algorithm is used to calculate the pixel loss and content loss. The experimental comparison results show that the proposed MRGAN model has achieved leading results for the global mosaic removal task.

The conventional masked image restoration algorithms all utilise the correlation between the masked region and its neighbouring pixels, which does not work well for the larger masked image. The latest research utilises Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) model to generate a better result for the larger masked image but does not work well for the complex masked region. To get a better result for the complex masked region, the authors propose a novel fast GANs model for masked image restoration. The method used in authors’ research is based on GANs model and fast marching method (FMM). The authors trained an FMMGAN model which consists of a neighbouring network, a generator network, a discriminator network, and two parsing networks. A large number of experimental results on two open datasets show that the proposed model performs well for masked image restoration.

Previously visible watermark removal algorithms required the location of known watermarks. A corresponding removal algorithm is then proposed based on the location and the feature of the watermark. If the location of the watermark is random or the watermark has different angles, the watermark removal algorithm will encounter problems. The authors recommend a visible watermark removal algorithm based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and self‐attention mechanisms. During the training, the authors introduce a GANs model to build mappings between watermarked images and real images. The authors observe that the feature of the watermarked region in different watermarked images is invariant in nature, and the other regions are changed. The self‐attention layer will automatically focus on this invariant feature. Experiments on two public datasets prove that the authors’ model has gained excellent performance. Compared with the other four most competitive watermark removal models, the authors improve the watermark removal rate indicator from 17 to 92%. For the other four evaluation indicators, the authors have improved performance by up to 20%.

With the rapid development of advanced media technology, especially the popularization of digital cameras and image editing software, digital images can be easily forged without leaving visible clues. Therefore, image forensics technology for identifying the accuracy, integrity, and originality of digital images has become increasingly important. Photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) noise, a unique fingerprint of imaging sensors, is a valuable forgery detection tool because of its consistently good detection performance. All kinds of forgeries, including copy-move and splicing, can be dealt with in a uniform manner. This paper addresses the problem of forgery localization based on PRNU estimation and aims to improve the resolution of PRNU-based algorithms. Different from traditional overlapping and sliding window-based methods, in which PRNU correlations are estimated on overlapped patches, the proposed scheme is analyzed based on nonoverlapping and irregular patches. First, the test image is segmented into nonoverlapped patches with multiple scales. Second, correlations of PRNU are estimated on nonoverlapped patches to obtain the real-valued candidate tampering probability map for each individual scale. Then, all of the candidate maps are fused into a single and more reliable probability map through an adaptive window strategy. In the final step, the final decision map is obtained by adopting a conditional random field (CRF) to model neighborhood interactions. The contributions of this work include the following: a novel PRNU-based forgery localization scheme using multi-scale nonoverlapping segmentation is proposed for the first time. Furthermore, the adaptive fusion strategy involves selecting the best candidate tampering probability individually for each location in the image. Additionally, the experimental results prove that the proposed scheme can achieve much better detection results and robustness compared with the existing state-of-the-art PRNU-based methods.

In juridical field, judges usually need to consult several relevant cases to determine the specific articles that the evidence violated, which is a task that is time consuming and needs extensive professional knowledge. In this paper, we focus on how to save the manual efforts and make the conviction process more efficient. Specifically, we treat the evidences as documents, and articles as labels, thus the conviction process can be cast as a multi-label classification problem. However, the challenge in this specific scenario lies in two aspects. One is that the number of articles that evidences violated is dynamic, which we denote as the label dynamic problem. The other is that most articles are violated by only a few of the evidences, which we denote as the label imbalance problem. Previous methods usually learn the multi-label classification model and the label thresholds independently, and may ignore the label imbalance problem. To tackle with both challenges, we propose a unified D ynamic P airwise A ttention M odel (DPAM for short) in this paper. Specifically, DPAM adopts the multi-task learning paradigm to learn the multi-label classifier and the threshold predictor jointly, and thus DPAM can improve the generalization performance by leveraging the information learned in both of the two tasks. In addition, a pairwise attention model based on article definitions is incorporated into the classification model to help alleviate the label imbalance problem. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.

The Android permission mechanism prevents malicious application from accessing the mobile multimedia data and invoking the sensitive API. However, there are still lots of deficiencies in the current permission management, which results in the permission mechanism being unable to protect users’ private data properly. In this paper, a dynamic management scheme of Android permission based on machine learning is proposed to solve the problem of the existing permission mechanism. In order to accomplish the dynamic management, the proposed scheme maintains a dynamic permission management database which records the state of permissions for each application. Only the permission which is granted state in the database can be used in this application. In the whole process, the scheme first classifies the application by means of machine learning, then retrieves the corresponding permission information from databases, and issues the dangerous permission warning to users. Finally, the scheme updates the dynamic management database according to the users’ decisions. Through this scheme, users can prevent malicious behaviour of accessing private data and invoking sensitive API in time. The solution increases the flexibility of permission management and improves the security and reliability of multimedia data in Android devices.