Comparative Analysis of Techniques Used to Detect Copy-Move Tampering for Real-World Electronic Images

Evolution of high computational powerful computers, easy availability of several innovative editing software package and high-definition quality-based image capturing tools follows to effortless result in producing image forgery. Though, threats for security and misinterpretation of digital images and scenes have been observed to be happened since a long period and also a lot of research has been established in developing diverse techniques to authenticate the digital images. On the contrary, the research in this region is not limited to checking the validity of digital photos but also to exploring the specific signs of distortion or forgery. This analysis would not require additional prior information of intrinsic content of corresponding digital image or prior embedding of watermarks. In this paper, recent growth in the area of digital image tampering identification have been discussed along with benchmarking study has been shown with qualitative and quantitative results. With variety of methodologies and concepts, different applications of forgery detection have been discussed with corresponding outcomes especially using machine and deep learning methods in order to develop efficient automated forgery detection system. The future applications and development of advanced soft-computing based techniques in digital image forgery tampering has been discussed

Persistent Homology Tools for Image Analysis

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a new field of mathematics emerged rapidly since the first decade of the century from various works of algebraic topology and geometry. The goal of TDA and its main tool of persistent homology (PH) is to provide topological insight into complex and high dimensional datasets. We take this premise onboard to get more topological insight from digital image analysis and quantify tiny low-level distortion that are undetectable except possibly by highly trained persons. Such image distortion could be caused intentionally (e.g. by morphing and steganography) or naturally in abnormal human tissue/organ scan images as a result of onset of cancer or other diseases. The main objective of this thesis is to design new image analysis tools based on persistent homological invariants representing simplicial complexes on sets of pixel landmarks over a sequence of distance resolutions. We first start by proposing innovative automatic techniques to select image pixel landmarks to build a variety of simplicial topologies from a single image. Effectiveness of each image landmark selection demonstrated by testing on different image tampering problems such as morphed face detection, steganalysis and breast tumour detection. Vietoris-Rips simplicial complexes constructed based on the image landmarks at an increasing distance threshold and topological (homological) features computed at each threshold and summarized in a form known as persistent barcodes. We vectorise the space of persistent barcodes using a technique known as persistent binning where we demonstrated the strength of it for various image analysis purposes. Different machine learning approaches are adopted to develop automatic detection of tiny texture distortion in many image analysis applications. Homological invariants used in this thesis are the 0 and 1 dimensional Betti numbers. We developed an innovative approach to design persistent homology (PH) based algorithms for automatic detection of the above described types of image distortion. In particular, we developed the first PH-detector of morphing attacks on passport face biometric images. We shall demonstrate significant accuracy of 2 such morph detection algorithms with 4 types of automatically extracted image landmarks: Local Binary patterns (LBP), 8-neighbour super-pixels (8NSP), Radial-LBP (R-LBP) and centre-symmetric LBP (CS-LBP). Using any of these techniques yields several persistent barcodes that summarise persistent topological features that help gaining insights into complex hidden structures not amenable by other image analysis methods. We shall also demonstrate significant success of a similarly developed PH-based universal steganalysis tool capable for the detection of secret messages hidden inside digital images. We also argue through a pilot study that building PH records from digital images can differentiate breast malignant tumours from benign tumours using digital mammographic images. The research presented in this thesis creates new opportunities to build real applications based on TDA and demonstrate many research challenges in a variety of image processing/analysis tasks. For example, we describe a TDA-based exemplar image inpainting technique (TEBI), superior to existing exemplar algorithm, for the reconstruction of missing image regions

Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Multi-disciplinary team directed analysis of whole genome sequencing reveals pathogenic non-coding variants in molecularly undiagnosed inherited retinal dystrophies

PURPOSE: To identify, using genome sequencing (GS), likely pathogenic non-coding variants in inherited retinal dystrophy (IRD) genes Methods: Patients with IRD were recruited to the study and underwent comprehensive ophthalmological evaluation and GS. The results of GS were investigated through virtual gene panel analysis and plausible pathogenic variants and clinical phenotype evaluated by multi-disciplinary team (MDT) discussion. For unsolved patients in whom a specific gene was suspected to harbour a missed pathogenic variant, targeted re-analysis of non-coding regions was performed on GS data. Candidate variants were functionally tested including by mRNA analysis, minigene and luciferase reporter assays. RESULTS: Previously unreported, likely pathogenic, non-coding variants, in 7 genes (PRPF31, NDP, IFT140, CRB1, USH2A, BBS10, and GUCY2D), were identified in 11 patients. These were shown to lead to mis-splicing (PRPF31, IFT140, CRB1, USH2A) or altered transcription levels (BBS10, GUCY2D). CONCLUSION: MDT-led, phenotype driven, non-coding variant re-analysis of GS is effective in identifying missing causative alleles

Copy-move forgery detection in digital images

The ready availability of image-editing software makes it important to ensure the authenticity of images. This thesis concerns the detection and localization of cloning, or Copy-Move Forgery (CMF), which is the most common type of image tampering, in which part(s) of the image are copied and pasted back somewhere else in the same image. Post-processing can be used to produce more realistic doctored images and thus can increase the difficulty of detecting forgery. This thesis presents three novel methods for CMF detection, using feature extraction, surface fitting and segmentation. The Dense Scale Invariant Feature Transform (DSIFT) has been improved by using a different method to estimate the canonical orientation of each circular block. The Fitting Function Rotation Invariant Descriptor (FFRID) has been developed by using the least squares method to fit the parameters of a quadratic function on each block curvatures. In the segmentation approach, three different methods were tested: the SLIC superpixels, the Bag of Words Image and the Rolling Guidance filter with the multi-thresholding method. We also developed the Segment Gradient Orientation Histogram (SGOH) to describe the gradient of irregularly shaped blocks (segments). The experimental results illustrate that our proposed algorithms can detect forgery in images containing copy-move objects with different types of transformation (translation, rotation, scaling, distortion and combined transformation). Moreover, the proposed methods are robust to post-processing (i.e. blurring, brightness change, colour reduction, JPEG compression, variations in contrast and added noise) and can detect multiple duplicated objects. In addition, we developed a new method to estimate the similarity threshold for each image by optimizing a cost function based probability distribution. This method can detect CMF better than using a fixed threshold for all the test images, because our proposed method reduces the false positive and the time required to estimate one threshold for different images in the dataset. Finally, we used the hysteresis to decrease the number of false matches and produce the best possible result