From Generation to Discrimination: Vision Foundation Models for Synthetic SEM Image Detection

In materials science, the integrity of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images is paramount for quality control and validation of research outcomes. However, the introduction of sophisticated generative artificial intelligence, particularly Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has introduced a novel vulnerability: the potential for highly realistic, artificially synthesized SEM images to be used fraudulently in scientific literature. To address this challenge, we present a deep learning-based framework capable of distinguishing between authentic SEM images and those synthesized by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Using FastGAN and StyleGAN2-ADA, two state-of-the-art GAN models, we generated synthetic SEM datasets to complement real imaging data. We fine-tuned a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) Vision Transformer (ViT-L-14) for binary classification. By unfreezing the final transformer blocks and appending a custom classification head, the model effectively captures the subtle, high-level artifacts inherent in GAN-generated upsampling. This work highlights the potential of deep learning to safeguard scientific imaging workflows and provides an important step toward detecting and mitigating image forgeries in materials science publications.