Secret Lies in Color: Enhancing AI-Generated Images Detection with Color Distribution Analysis

Zexi Jia, Chuanwei Huang, Yeshuang Zhu, Hongyan Fei, Xiaoyue Duan, Zhiqiang Yuan, Ying Deng, Jiapei Zhang, Jinchao Zhang, Jie Zhou; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 13445-13454

The advancement of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models significantly enhances the realism of synthetic images, driving progress in image processing and creative design. However, this progress also necessitates the development of effective detection methods, as synthetic images become increasingly difficult to distinguish from real ones. This difficulty leads to societal issues, such as the spread of misinformation, identity theft, and online fraud. While previous detection methods perform well on public benchmarks, they struggle with our benchmark, FakeART, particularly when dealing with the latest models and cross-domain tasks (e.g., photo-to-painting). To address this challenge, we develop a new synthetic image detection technique based on color distribution. Unlike real images, synthetic images often exhibit uneven color distribution. By employing color quantization and restoration techniques, we analyze the color differences before and after image restoration. We discover and prove that these differences closely relate to the uniformity of color distribution. Based on this finding, we extract effective color features and combine them with image features to create a detection model with only 1.4 million parameters. This model achieves state-of-the-art results across various evaluation benchmarks, including the challenging FakeART dataset.