Fake Image Detection - A Lab Report

Report
As I want to continue practising my writing, and I’m currently doing a research collaboration, I asked myself, isn’t this a great moment to write a report-like post? So welcome :D In this long post, I am going to record my journey, my thought process, and my ups and downs while doing this project. I hope that those who read this post could gain some insights if they wanted to research this very same topic.

This fake image detection research is a collaborative effort between me and my online friend, Panji. He approached me on July 29th, 2025, explaining that he wanted to collaborate on doing research in Computer Vision, particularly Fake Image detection. At first, I almost said no since I had never heard or read a single paper on the topic, and I wanted to focus on preparing my materials for my master’s. But then I thought, why not challenge myself with something completely new? Especially if that topic still intersects with my interests.

Setting things up

As I agreed to pull this project together with him, I offered myself to build a spreadsheet dashboard to monitor our progress and to store our literature review and our draft. And because I highly value the spirit of ‘open-source’, all of my projects, anyone who wants the template can ask me through this email.

a picture that shows the dashboard, it consists of Shortcut Links and Table of Contents
This is the project dashboard

From the picture, we can see that I have ordered this spreadsheet based on the project’s timeline. There are at least 10 pages with different functions. Here are the details:

  • README, for onboarding and file management;
  • Meeting notes, to log meeting topics, dates, discussions or decisions, PIC, status, deadline date, and additional notes;
  • Timeline, it’s more like a Gantt chart wannabe;

An image that shows the example of how the timeline being showed, similar to Gantt Chart
Timeline example

  • List of resources, to store all the resources, like papers, datasets, repositories, videos, etc..
  • Paper review, to store all papers that are already reviewed, with fields like title, link, strengths and weaknesses, dataset used, performance, etc..
  • The rest are pages containing separate drafts organised by sections. Each is structured as Q&A, for example, in introduction section for my first few sentences, I have to answer “What is the background of this project?”

Our first meeting was scheduled on August 2nd, 2025. I proposed several topics to be discussed, such as what our target is, whether we wanted to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal or a conference? If it is a peer-reviewed journal, is it Scopus-indexed or just Sinta-indexed? In addition, I thought that we also need to address our milestones, topics related to our background, and task assignments. Our first meeting went very well, and we just left a few topics that need to be addressed further in the next meeting. So I thought we were very productive that day XD

First, we decided to submit our paper to a peer-reviewed journal, so we eliminated our first option to submit it to a conference. Initially, when we were debating whether to submit it to a Sinta- or Scopus-indexed journal, we searched for possible journals here. However, we soon noticed that Scopus also indexes several Sinta-indexed journals. Based on that discovery, we agreed to prioritise Sinta-indexed journals that are also Scopus-indexed. There were several considerations, but most of them, whether it was already discontinued, in Bahasa Indonesia, the next issue was too far away, or the publication fees were too much for us. Then we came across a journal that we agreed on, but I do not want to share it publicly now (To avoid riya’ and evil eyes :D)

At that meeting, we also agreed to limit our research only on fake image detection. But what is the definition of a fake image? I do not know how to answer this until our third meeting sadly :")

Between the first meeting and the second (August 6th, 2025), we agreed to review at least 15 papers each. The goal was to understand the context and the history of this research topic. Next, I will share my thought process during the literature review in the next section.