High-Precision Heterogeneous Satellite Image Manipulation Localization: Feature Point Rules and Semantic Similarity Measurement

Misusing image tampering software makes it easier to manipulate satellite images, leading to a crisis of trust and security concerns in society. This study compares the inconsistencies between heterogeneous images to locate tampered areas and proposes a high-precision heterogeneous satellite image manipulation localization (HSIML) framework to distinguish tampered from real landcover changes, such as artificial constructions, and pseudo-changes, such as seasonal variations. The model operates at the patch level and comprises three modules: The heterogeneous image preprocessing module aligns heterogeneous images and filters noisy data. The feature point constraint module mitigates the effects of lighting and seasonal variations in the images by performing feature point matching, applying filtering rules to conduct an initial screening to identify candidate tampered patches. The semantic similarity measurement module designs a classification network to assess RS image feature saliency. It determines image consistency based on the similarity of semantic features and implements IML using predefined classification rules. Additionally, a dataset for IML is constructed based on satellite images. Extensive experiments compared with existing SOTA models demonstrate that our method achieved the highest F1 score in both localization accuracy and robustness tests and demonstrates the capability for handling large-scale areas.