CTP-Net: Character Texture Perception Network for Document Image Forgery Localization

Due to the progression of information technology in recent years, document images have been widely disseminated in social networks. With the help of powerful image editing tools, document images are easily forged without leaving visible manipulation traces, which leads to severe issues if significant information is falsified for malicious use. Therefore, the research of document image forensics is worth further exploring. In a document image, the character with specific semantic information is most vulnerable to tampering, for which capturing the forgery traces of the character is the key to localizing the forged region in document images. Considering both character and image textures, in this paper, we propose a Character Texture Perception Network (CTP-Net) to localize the forgery of document images. Based on optical character recognition, a Character Texture Stream (CTS) is designed to capture features of text areas that are essential components of a document image. Meanwhile, texture features of the whole document image are exploited by an Image Texture Stream (ITS). Combining the features extracted from the CTS and the ITS, the CTP-Net can reveal more subtle forgery traces from document images. To overcome the challenge caused by the lack of fake document images, we design a data generation strategy that is utilized to construct a Fake Chinese Trademark dataset (FCTM). Through a series of experiments, we show that the proposed CTP-Net is able to capture tampering traces in document images, especially in text regions. Experimental results demonstrate that CTP-Net can localize multi-scale forged areas in document images and outperform the state-of-the-art forgery localization methods.