An Agentic ENF Framework for Forensic Video Authentication Against Generative AI

arXiv:2610.22440v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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 an independent reference rather than on presence. On held-out real recordings the detector accepts genuine audio and video at 93% and 100% against naive baselines of 53% and 15%; claimed-time authentication reaches an area under the curve of 1.0; and the agentic cascade matches a flat ensemble while cutting wall-clock time by 54% and frames decoded by 64%, without loss of accuracy.