Symmetry-Guided Dual-Branch Network with Adaptive Feature Fusion and Edge-Aware Attention for Image Tampering Localization

When faced with diverse types of image tampering and image quality degradation in real-world scenarios, traditional image tampering localization methods often struggle to balance boundary accuracy and robustness. To address these issues, this paper proposes a symmetric guided dual-branch image tampering localization network—FENet (Fusion-Enhanced Network)—that integrates adaptive feature fusion and edge attention mechanisms. This method is based on a structurally symmetric dual-branch architecture, which extracts RGB semantic features and SRM noise residual information to comprehensively capture the fine-grained differences in tampered regions at the visual and statistical levels. To effectively fuse different features, this paper designs a self-calibrating fusion module (SCF), which introduces a content-aware dynamic weighting mechanism to adaptively adjust the importance of different feature branches, thereby enhancing the discriminative power and expressiveness of the fused features. Furthermore, considering that image tampering often involves abnormal changes in edge structures, we further propose an edge-aware coordinate attention mechanism (ECAM). By jointly modeling spatial position information and edge-guided information, the model is guided to focus more precisely on potential tampering boundaries, thereby enhancing its boundary detection and localization capabilities. Experiments on public datasets such as Columbia, CASIA, and NIST16 demonstrate that FENet achieves significantly better results than existing methods. We also analyze the model’s performance under various image quality conditions, such as JPEG compression and Gaussian blur, demonstrating its robustness in real-world scenarios. Experiments in Facebook, Weibo, and WeChat scenarios show that our method achieves average F1 scores that are 2.8%, 3%, and 5.6% higher than those of existing state-of-the-art methods, respectively.