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Paper ID:IJSREM68642

Explainable Dual-Model Framework for AI-Generated Image and Image-Tampering Detection

Stream/Area:

-

Subject:

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Paper ID:

IJSREM68642

Volume:

10 |

10 |

Oct 2026

Pages:

1-6

Publication Frequency:

Monthly (12 issues per year)

DOI
Digital Object Identifier
10.55041/IJSREM68642

License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

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Authors

PAR

Pooja A R

Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science)

SJB Institute of Technology

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PYN

Pooja Y N

Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science)

SJB Institute of Technology

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ARN

Amrutha R N

Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science)

SJB Institute of Technology

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VJ

Vindyashree J

Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science)

SJB Institute of Technology

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Mentors

VJ

Vindyashree J

Computer Science and Engineering (Data Science)

SJB Institute of Technology

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Abstract

Looking at a photo is no longer enough to tell whether it is real. Image generators can now produce a convincing picture in a few seconds, and almost any phone editor can change part of a real one. We built Trustify AI to check uploaded images for both problems, and also to show the user what each verdict is based on. Two EfficientNet-B0 networks look at every upload. The first was fine-tuned on CIFAKE and looks for signs of AI generation; the second was fine-tuned on CASIA 2.0, after we stripped out duplicate images, and looks for signs of tampering. A small set of rules turns their two scores into a label (Original, AI Generated, or AI Edited/Manipulated). Along with the label, the user sees a confidence value and a trust score, plus the file's properties, any EXIF data that is still present, and Grad-CAM heatmaps. The detectors scored 89.56% and 78.87% on their held-out test sets. When we then tried 13 real photos from outside both datasets, the CIFAKE model called 11 of them fake. For us this was the main lesson of the work, since a good benchmark score clearly did not mean the detector would work on ordinary pictures. So instead of a single score, Trustify AI shows the user several kinds of evidence and states where it is likely to be wrong.

KEYWORDS

Image Authenticity AI-Generated Images Image Manipulation Explainable AI Grad-CAM EfficientNet-B0.

Cite This Article

Pooja A R, Pooja Y N, Amrutha R N, Vindyashree J, Vindyashree J, "Explainable Dual-Model Framework for AI-Generated Image and Image-Tampering Detection," International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management, vol. 10, no. 10, pp. 1-6, Oct 2026. https://doi.org/10.55041/IJSREM68642

Full Article/Conclusion

We have described Trustify AI, a framework that checks whether a digital image is authentic and explains how it reached its answer. The framework combines two EfficientNet-B0 detectors with metadata inspection, a rule-based decision engine, and Grad-CAM explanations. The CIFAKE detector scored 89.56% on its benchmark and the CASIA detector 78.87% on a split free of leakage. The outside test, however, gave a very different picture. The AI-generation detector flagged 11 of 13 real photographs, which shows a large generalization gap. We take this as a strong reason to show several kinds of evidence and to report results openly, instead of relying on benchmark accuracy alone. The framework is a workable first step toward transparent authenticity checking, but it is not yet ready for high-stakes forensic use. Before that, it will need larger and more varied training data, calibrated thresholds, and independent validation.

References

[1]     I. Goodfellow et al., “Generative adversarial nets,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 27, 2014. [2]     J. Ho, A. Jain, and P. Abbeel, “Denoising diffusion probabilistic models,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 33, 2020, pp. 6840–6851. [3]     L. Verdoliva, “Media forensics and deepfakes: An overview,” IEEE J. Sel. Topics Signal Process., vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 910–932, 2020. [4]     S.-Y. Wang, O. Wang, R. Zhang, A. Owens, and A. A. Efros, “CNN-generated images are surprisingly easy to spot… for now,” in Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., 2020, pp. 8695–8704. [5]     J. Dong, W. Wang, and T. Tan, “CASIA image tampering detection evaluation database,” in Proc. IEEE China Summit Int. Conf. Signal Inf. Process. (ChinaSIP), 2013, pp. 422–426. [6]     M. Tan and Q. V. Le, “EfficientNet: Rethinking model scaling for convolutional neural networks,” in Proc. 36th Int. Conf. Mach. Learn., 2019, pp. 6105–6114. [7]     J. J. Bird and A. Lotfi, “CIFAKE: Image classification and explainable identification of AI-generated synthetic images,” IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 15642–15650, 2024. [8]     R. R. Selvaraju, M. Cogswell, A. Das, R. Vedantam, D. Parikh, and D. Batra, “Grad-CAM: Visual explanations from deep networks via gradient-based localization,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis., 2017, pp. 618–626. [9]     J. Deng, W. Dong, R. Socher, L.-J. Li, K. Li, and L. Fei-Fei, “ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., 2009, pp. 248–255.

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Publication Date

10/31/2026

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