Skip to main content

New Research on Shadows and Reflections Presented at WIFS 2024

Marco Fontani

Reading time: 2 min

This blog post highlights groundbreaking research on deepfakes presented at WIFS 2024. Discover how analyzing shadows and reflections in AI-generated images can expose manipulation.

At Amped Software, we’ve always stood at the intersection of applied technology and scientific rigor. Our commitment to advancing forensic video analysis is evident in our industry-leading tools and also in our active contributions to the global scientific community.

We’re proud to share that our latest research on detecting deepfakes was presented a few months ago at the prestigious IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) 2024. This marks another significant milestone in our journey!

Our scientific paper, “Assessing shadows and reflections consistency in AI-generated images”, has been published in the WIFS 2024 proceedings and is available on IEEE Xplore here. 

The paper made two contributions, which are described below.

Evaluating the Consistency of Shadows and Reflections in Diffusion Model Deepfakes

We created 150 visually credible deepfake images with three well-known services based on diffusion models: Midjourney, Dall-E, and Fooocus.

Aerial view of a military camp with soldiers walking between beige tents along a dirt pathway. Overlaid green lines are used for shadow analysis, indicating sun angles and helping to determine the time of day. Red lines mark the central vanishing point for perspective reference.

The authors then manually analyzed shadows and reflections in all of them, and the results were peer-reviewed. They revealed that, at the time of writing, Dall-E and Fooocus had a tough time creating consistent shadows and reflections, while Midjourney performed better with both. Nevertheless, 16 out of 40 images with shadows and 4 out of 10 images with reflections were found inconsistent for Midjourney., This confirmeding that geometric analysis is a powerful tool even when dealing with high-quality deepfake images.

Defining a Practical Approach to Reflection Analysis

In the paper, we demonstrated that reflection consistency can be addressed similarly to shadow consistency by exploiting the main geometric properties of the linear perspective, as visually suggested in the image below. This has resulted in the recent addition of the Reflection filter to Amped Authenticate.

Side-by-side diagrams comparing shadow and reflection geometry in image forensics. The left diagram illustrates shadow analysis using green lines tracing light rays from a projected light source to object points and their cast shadows on the ground. The right diagram depicts reflection geometry, showing how an object's reflection is captured in a mirror with respect to the optical center and image plane. Both diagrams feature key elements like optical center, image plane, and projection lines to assist in verifying image authenticity and spatial relationships.

This contribution underscores Amped’s continued efforts to address the complex challenges of image and video authentication through rigorous, peer-reviewed research. Subscribe to our blog and follow us on social media so you won’t miss any discoveries from our research team!

 Marco Fontani

Marco Fontani is the Forensics Director at Amped Software, a software company developing image and video forensic solutions for law enforcement agencies worldwide. He earned his MSc in Computer Engineering in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Information Engineering in 2014. His research focused on image watermarking and multimedia forensics. He participated in several research projects funded by the EU and EOARD, and authored/co-authored over 30 journal and conference proceedings papers. He has experience in delivering training to law enforcement and provided expert witness testimony on several forensic cases involving digital images and videos. He is a former member of the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee, and he actively contributed to the development of ENFSI’s Best Practice Manual for Image Authentication.

Subscribe to our Blog

Receive an email notification when a new blog post is published and don’t miss out on our latest updates, how-tos, case studies and much more content!