Journals / Mugla Journal of Science and Technology / 2026 / Volume: 12 Issue: 1

ResNet Architectures for Digital Image Forgery Detection: A Comparison on Depth and Structural Differences

Ahmet Esat Duru(GAZİ ÜNİVERSİTESİ)0009-0005-0262-2502
İsmail Atacak(GAZİ ÜNİVERSİTESİ)0000-0002-6357-0073
Pages
—
Publication Date
2026-06-30
🏛️Bibliographic metadata and full text access for this article are provided via DergiPark.
DergiPark Record ↗
✨

AI Summary & Key Takeaways

AI Insight
⚡ TL;DR(Too Long; Didn't Read)

Experimental results demonstrated that the ResNet-50 model (25.6 M), which contains nearly the same number of parameters as ResNeXt-50—the model with the fewest parameters (25.0 M)—achieved the highest performance among all ResNet models in terms of most confusion metrics, with an accuracy of 0.8633, an F1-score of 0.8441, a precision of 0.7862, and a specificity of 0.8304.

📌 3 Key Takeaways

🎯
Objective & Hypothesis:Today, in parallel with technological advancements, the proliferation of image editing tools and artificial intelligence-based manipulation systems has led to an increase in digital image forgery, which has brought about significant problems at the societal level concerning reliability, security, and disinformation.
📊
Key Findings & Data:Standard-depth models comprising ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and ResNet-152 as ResNet architectures, along with structural variants including Wide ResNet-50 and ResNeXt-50, were trained and tested on the CASIA v2.0 dataset, which is regarded as a benchmark in the image forgery literature.
💡
Conclusion & Impact:Experimental results demonstrated that the ResNet-50 model (25.6 M), which contains nearly the same number of parameters as ResNeXt-50—the model with the fewest parameters (25.0 M)—achieved the highest performance among all ResNet models in terms of most confusion metrics, with an accuracy of 0.8633, an F1-score of 0.8441, a precision of 0.7862, and a specificity of 0.8304.
🔬Design:Modeling & Simulation
📍Scope:Comprehensive Sample
⚙️Variables:Image forgery detection · Deep learning · ResNet

Abstract

Today, in parallel with technological advancements, the proliferation of image editing tools and artificial intelligence-based manipulation systems has led to an increase in digital image forgery, which has brought about significant problems at the societal level concerning reliability, security, and disinformation. In this context, it is observed that the majority of recent studies aimed at addressing this problem focus on deep learning (DL) and architectures derived therefrom. In this study, the effectiveness of DL-based residual neural network (ResNet) architectures in forgery detection was examined and analyzed through a comparative approach along the axes of depth and structural diversity. Standard-depth models comprising ResNet-50, ResNet-101, and ResNet-152 as ResNet architectures, along with structural variants including Wide ResNet-50 and ResNeXt-50, were trained and tested on the CASIA v2.0 dataset, which is regarded as a benchmark in the image forgery literature. Contrary to the common assumption, the analyses indicate that increasing depth does not always improve performance in forgery detection. Experimental results demonstrated that the ResNet-50 model (25.6 M), which contains nearly the same number of parameters as ResNeXt-50—the model with the fewest parameters (25.0 M)—achieved the highest performance among all ResNet models in terms of most confusion metrics, with an accuracy of 0.8633, an F1-score of 0.8441, a precision of 0.7862, and a specificity of 0.8304. Although the Wide ResNet-50 model performed better in recall and AUC metrics with scores of 0.9151 and 0.9353, respectively, the performance gap is marginal when compared to the corresponding metric scores of the ResNet-50 model. Considering that the Wide ResNet-50 model is significantly more complex than ResNet-50 in terms of the number of parameters, ResNet-50 has emerged as the prominent model among all ResNet architectures in image forgery detection in terms of overall performance. The findings reveal that architectural design choices constitute a more decisive factor than the mere number of layers in image forgery detection.

🔖

Cite This Article

Duru, A. E., Atacak, İ., *, İ. A. (2026). ResNet Architectures for Digital Image Forgery Detection: A Comparison on Depth and Structural Differences. Mugla Journal of Science and Technology, Volume: 12 Issue: 1. https://doi.org/10.22531/muglajsci.1952975

📄 Full Text PDF Viewer

📄

PDF görüntüleyici hazırlanıyor...

References (33)

  1. M. Zanardelli, F. Guerrini, R. Leonardi, and N. Adami, “Image forgery detection: a survey of recent deep-learning approaches,” Multimed Tools Appl, vol. 82, no. 12, pp. 17521–17566, May 2023, doi: 10.1007/s11042-022-13797-w.
  2. F. Z. Mehrjardi, A. M. Latif, M. S. Zarchi, and R. Sheikhpour, “A survey on deep learning-based image forgery detection,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 144, p. 109778, Dec. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.patcog.2023.109778.
  3. M. R. Subhi, S. Yussof, L. A. binti B. A. binti Burhanuddin, and F. L. Khaleel, “CNNs in Image Forensics: A Systematic Literature Review of Copy-Move, Splicing, Noise Detection, and Data Poisoning Detection Methods,” Mesopotamian Journal of CyberSecurity, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 636–656, Jul. 2025, doi: 10.58496/MJCS/2025/038.
  4. S. Singh and R. Kumar, “Image forgery detection: comprehensive review of digital forensics approaches,” J Comput Soc Sc, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 877–915, Apr. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s42001-024-00265-8.
  5. A. Radhakrishnan, T. N. Sawant, C. Raghuram, D. J. Railis, and H. Singh, “Exploring machine learning approaches for efficient image forgery detection,” Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 1375–1391, Jul. 2025, doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.70069.
  6. B. Bayar and M. C. Stamm, “A Deep Learning Approach to Universal Image Manipulation Detection Using a New Convolutional Layer,” in Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, Vigo Galicia Spain: ACM, Jun. 2016, pp. 5–10. doi: 10.1145/2909827.2930786.
  7. E. U. H. Qazi, T. Zia, and A. Almorjan, “Deep Learning-Based Digital Image Forgery Detection System,” Applied Sciences, vol. 12, no. 6, p. 2851, Mar. 2022, doi: 10.3390/app12062851.
  8. Ö. Kasim, “Deep learning-based efficient and robust image forgery detection,” Multimed Tools Appl, vol. 83, no. 21, pp. 59819–59838, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s11042-023-17946-7.
  9. J. R. Korsipati, R. M. R. Yanamala, A. Pallakonda, R. D. A. Raj, and K. K. Prakasha, “Multi-resolution transfer learning for tampered image classification using SE-enhanced fused-MBConv and optimized CNN heads,” Sci Rep, vol. 15, no. 1, p. 32717, Sep. 2025, doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-17799-0.
  10. K. M. Hosny, A. M. Mortda, M. M. Fouda, and N. A. Lashin, “An Efficient CNN Model to Detect Copy-Move Image Forgery,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 48622–48632, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3172273.
  11. P. V. Dell’Olmo, O. Kuznetsov, E. Frontoni, M. Arnesano, C. Napoli, and C. Randieri, “Dataset Dependency in CNN-Based Copy-Move Forgery Detection: A Multi-Dataset Comparative Analysis,” Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 54, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.3390/make7020054.
  12. S. Tyagi and D. Yadav, “FORENSICNET: Modern convolutional neural network‐based image forgery detection network,” Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 461–469, Mar. 2023, doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.15210.
  13. S. Tyagi and D. Yadav, “MiniNet: a concise CNN for image forgery detection,” Evolving Systems, vol. 14, pp. 1–12, Jun. 2022, doi: 10.1007/s12530-022-09446-0.
  14. G. Singh and P. Goyal, “SDCN2: A Shallow Densely Connected CNN for Multi-Purpose Image Manipulation Detection,” ACM Trans. Multimedia Comput. Commun. Appl., vol. 18, no. 3s, p. 150:1-150:22, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.1145/3510462.
  15. K. Rana, G. Singh, and P. Goyal, “MSRD-CNN: Multi-Scale Residual Deep CNN for General-purpose Image Manipulation Detection,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, Apr. 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3167714.
  16. N. Kaur, “Hybrid image splicing detection: Integrating CLAHE, improved CNN, and SVM for digital image forensics,” Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 273, p. 126756, May 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.126756.
  17. S. Chakraborty, K. Chatterjee, and P. Dey, “Detection of Image Tampering Using Deep Learning, Error Levels and Noise Residuals,” Neural Process Lett, vol. 56, no. 2, p. 112, Mar. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s11063-024-11448-9.
  18. S. Kaur, S. Chopra, A. Nayyar, R. Sharma, and G. Singh, “A sequential convolutional neural network for image forgery detection,” Multimed Tools Appl, vol. 83, no. 14, pp. 41311–41325, Apr. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s11042-023-17028-8.
  19. M. Fahad et al., “Advanced deepfake detection with enhanced Resnet-18 and multilayer CNN max pooling,” The Visual Computer, vol. 41, pp. 3473–3486, Sep. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s00371-024-03613-x.
  20. T. Aruna, P. Naresh, B. A. Kumar, B. K. Prakash, K. M. Mohan, and P. M. Reddy, “Analyzing and Detecting Digital Counterfeit Images using DenseNet, ResNet and CNN,” in 2024 8th International Conference on Inventive Systems and Control (ICISC), Jul. 2024, pp. 248–252. doi: 10.1109/ICISC62624.2024.00049.
  21. S. Vaishali and S. Neetu, “Enhanced copy-move forgery detection using deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) employing the ResNet-101 transfer learning model,” Multimed Tools Appl, vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 10839–10863, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.1007/s11042-023-15724-z.
  22. D. Lamichhane, “Advanced Detection of AI-Generated Images Through Vision Transformers,” TechRxiv, vol. 2024, no. 0905, doi: 10.36227/techrxiv.172556912.28757771/v1.
  23. S. Usmani, S. Kumar, and D. Sadhya, “Efficient deepfake detection using shallow vision transformer,” Multimedia Tools Appl., vol. 83, no. 4, pp. 12339–12362, Jun. 2023, doi: 10.1007/s11042-023-15910-z.
  24. Z. Chen, H. Li, and J. Hu, “Multi-Scale High-Frequency Vision Transformer for Face Forgery Detection,” IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 740–750, Oct. 2025, doi: 10.1109/TBIOM.2025.3543692.
  25. Y.-J. Heo, W.-H. Yeo, and B.-G. Kim, “DeepFake detection algorithm based on improved vision transformer,” Appl Intell, vol. 53, no. 7, pp. 7512–7527, Apr. 2023, doi: 10.1007/s10489-022-03867-9.
  26. M. Abdelmaksoud, B. Youssef, K. Wassif, and R. A. El-Khoribi, “Hybrid framework for image forgery detection and robustness against adversarial attacks using vision transformer and SVM,” Sci Rep, vol. 15, no. 1, p. 40371, Nov. 2025.
  27. “CASIA 2.0 Image Tampering Detection Dataset.” Accessed: Feb. 13, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/divg07/casia-20-image-tampering-detection-dataset
  28. K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, and J. Sun, “Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition,” Dec. 10, 2015, arXiv: arXiv:1512.03385. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1512.03385.
  29. A.- I, “Understanding ResNet Architecture: A Deep Dive into Residual Neural Network,” Medium. Accessed: Apr. 20, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://medium.com/@ibtedaazeem/understanding-resnet-architecture-a-deep-dive-into-residual-neural-network-2c792e6537a9
  30. V. Jayaswal, “Performance Metrics: Confusion matrix, Precision, Recall, and F1 Score,” Towards Data Science. Accessed: Apr. 21, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://towardsdatascience.com/performance-metrics-confusion-matrix-precision-recall-and-f1-score-a8fe076a2262/
  31. İ. Atacak, “Kalp Yetmezliği Tahmininin Kategorik Olarak Farklı Tip Makine Öğrenmesi Yöntemleri ile Uygulanmasına Yönelik Bir Değerlendirme Çalışması,” EMO Bilimsel Dergi, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 73–85, Jan. 2024.
  32. “Multicriteria recommender system using different approaches,” in Cognitive Big Data Intelligence with a Metaheuristic Approach, Academic Press, 2022, pp. 259–277.
  33. Q. Li, C. Wang, X. Zhou, and Z. Qin, “Image copy-move forgery detection and localization based on super-BPD segmentation and DCNN,” Sci Rep, vol. 12, no. 1, p. 14987, Sep. 2022, doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-19325-y.