Synthetic Image Detection: Highlights from the IEEE Video and Image Processing Cup 2022 Student Competition

The Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup is a student competition that takes place each year at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. The 2022 IEEE VIP Cup asked undergraduate students to develop a system capable of distinguishing pristine images from generated ones. The interest in this topic stems from the incredible advances in the AI-based generation of visual data, with tools that allows the synthesis of highly realistic images and videos. While this opens up a large number of new opportunities, it also undermines the trustworthiness of media content and fosters the spread of disinformation on the internet. Recently there was strong concern about the generation of extremely realistic images by means of editing software that includes the recent technology on diffusion models. In this context, there is a need to develop robust and automatic tools for synthetic image detection.