Enhancing AAV-Based Industrial Systems With Cognitive IoT: Detecting AI-Manipulated Visual Data Using Graph-Based Methods

The integration of Cognitive Internet of Things (IoT) sensors with autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) has transformed industrial sectors, such as monitoring, logistics, and infrastructure inspection. However, the advancement of visual synthesis technologies like generative adversarial networks and diffusion models has introduced significant risks by enabling the creation of highly realistic AI-manipulated content, making the detection of falsified imagery increasingly challenging. Existing detection methods, largely based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), focus primarily on global image features and often overlook crucial relational connections, limiting their robustness and generalization. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel dual-stream architecture that integrates global feature extraction with relational feature learning. By combining the CLIP model with a graph-based topology, our approach identifies hard-to-detect samples and processes them through a graph convolutional network (GCN) to capture both structural and relational information. Extensive evaluations validate the robustness and generalization ability of our method across various generative models and real-world perturbations. This approach offers a scalable and reliable solution to ensure data integrity in industrial IoT systems, helping to preserve societal trust in AI-driven applications.