A Benchmark for Image Forgery Detection and Localization on Social Media Images

The widespread manipulation of digital images on social media has significantly undermined public trust in visual content and created major challenges for automated forgery detection. These challenges are further intensified by platform-induced degradations such as compression, resizing, and filtering, which often obscure forensic traces. This work develops FIDD-6000, a large-scale benchmark dataset for image forgery detection and localization, containing 6000 social media images, including 1000 authentic and 5000 manipulated samples, with pixel-level ground-truth masks annotated across three forgery categories, splicing, copy-move, and retouching, all created under realistic post-processing conditions. Each manipulated image is accompanied by a pixel-level ground-truth mask indicating the tampered regions. To assess the challenges posed by social media-based image manipulation, we evaluate 15 state-of-the-art image forgery localization methods on FIDD-6000, including approaches based on JPEG compression artifacts, sensor-noise analysis, and error level analysis. Experimental results show that these methods perform poorly on the proposed dataset, revealing their limited effectiveness in detecting forged images that have undergone social media-specific compression and transformation. This performance gap highlights the need for more robust and advanced machine learning and deep learning approaches capable of handling the complexity of modern image manipulations. Therefore, FIDD-6000 provides a valuable resource for researchers by offering a rigorous benchmark for developing, evaluating, and comparing next-generation forgery detection and localization methods.