FreqCross: A Multi-Modal Frequency-Spatial Fusion Network for Robust Detection of Stable Diffusion 3.5 Generated Images

Abstract

The rapid advancement of diffusion models, particularly Stable Diffusion 3.5, has enabled the generation of highly photorealistic synthetic images that pose significant challenges to existing detection methods. This paper presents FreqCross, a novel multi-modal fusion network that combines spatial RGB features, frequency domain artifacts, and radial energy distribution patterns to achieve robust detection of AI-generated images. Our approach leverages a three-branch architecture: (1) a ResNet-18 backbone for spatial feature extraction, (2) a lightweight CNN for processing 2D FFT magnitude spectra, and (3) a multi-layer perceptron for analyzing radial energy profiles. We introduce a novel radial energy distribution analysis that captures characteristic frequency artifacts inherent in diffusion-generated images, and fuse it with spatial and spectral cues via simple feature concatenation followed by a compact classification head. Extensive experiments on a dataset of 10,000 paired real (MS-COCO) and synthetic (Stable Diffusion 3.5) images demonstrate that FreqCross achieves 97.8\% accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by 5.2\%. The frequency analysis further reveals that synthetic images exhibit distinct spectral signatures in the 0.1--0.4 normalised frequency range, providing theoretical foundation for our approach. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available to facilitate reproducible research.