We are happy to share that Xander Staelens, a member of our research group, has won the Audience’s Choice Award at this year’s Faculty of Engineering and Architecture Research Symposium (FEARS) for his work on making image forgery detection more reliable.
Xander’s work shows how added visual elements like logos or captions can distract fake image detectors, causing them to miss actual forgeries. His solution improves detector robustness, helping them focus on the real manipulations while ignoring distractions. This makes existing detection methods more reliable, especially on social media, where such distractions are frequent.
