Chengliang Yan, Lei Zhang, Xiaodong Lu
2026.1.10IMAGING SCIENCE JOURNAL
Abstract
With the rapid development of image editing techniques, accurately localizing manipulated regions remains challenging due to subtle artifacts and diverse manipulation patterns. Existing methods insufficiently exploit multi-scale frequency cues and often lack effective cross-level feature interaction. To address this, we propose a multi-scale frequency-aware framework for reliable manipulation localization. The core MFAFF module introduces adaptive low-pass and high-pass filtering to suppress irrelevant noise in high-level features while enhancing fine boundary details in low-level features. A lightweight depthwise separable convolutional decoder further improves spatial modeling efficiency. A joint loss combining BCE, Dice, and edge supervision enhances region accuracy and boundary precision. Extensive cross-dataset experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of adaptive frequency modeling in robust manipulation localization.
Citation format
YAN, Chengliang; ZHANG, Lei; LU, Xiaodong. An image manipulation localization method based on multi-scale frequency awareness. IMAGING SCIENCE JOURNAL, 2026, 74(4): 474–487.