An Agentic ENF Framework for Forensic Video Authentication Against Generative AI

Ryan Wyton, Bacha Rehman

Generative models now synthesise video that is hard to distinguish from genuine footage, and learned detectors that key on a generator's artefacts degrade sharply on unseen models. This paper develops a forensic framework that authenticates video by a signal that generation does not control: the electric network frequency (ENF), the mains-driven hum in audio and flicker in video. A unified two-channel detector extracts the ENF from audio and from rolling-shutter video through one second harmonic estimator and a shared network; a synthetic-injection training method, driven by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck drift model and anchored to real recordings, overcomes the scarcity of labelled ENF data; a reference-matching channel verifies a claimed time of recording and recovers an unknown one; and a two-axis agentic orchestrator fuses recording authenticity with content-manipulation evidence under an asymmetric rule, escalating expensive detectors only when needed. A central finding reframes the task: an ENF-band flicker is present in generated video at a prominence indistinguishable from real footage, so its presence is not proof of authenticity, and authentication must rest on consistency with…