An Overview on Image Forensics

The aim of this survey is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the area of image forensics. These techniques have been designed to identify the source of a digital image or to determine whether the content is authentic or modified, without the knowledge of any prior information about the image under analysis (and thus are defined as passive). All these tools work by detecting the presence, the absence, or the incongruence of some traces intrinsically tied to the digital image by the acquisition device and by any other operation after its creation. The paper has been organized by classifying the tools according to the position in the history of the digital image in which the relative footprint is left: acquisition-based methods, coding-based methods, and editing-based schemes

Image splicing detection scheme using adaptive threshold mean ternary pattern descriptor

The rapid growth of image editing applications has an impact on image forgery cases. Image forgery is a big challenge in authentic image identification. Images can be readily altered using post-processing effects, such as blurring shallow depth, JPEG compression, homogenous regions, and noise to forge the image. Besides, the process can be applied in the spliced image to produce a composite image. Thus, there is a need to develop a scheme of image forgery detection for image splicing. In this research, suitable features of the descriptors for the detection of spliced forgery are defined. These features will reduce the impact of blurring shallow depth, homogenous area, and noise attacks to improve the accuracy. Therefore, a technique to detect forgery at the image level of the image splicing was designed and developed. At this level, the technique involves four important steps. Firstly, convert colour image to three colour channels followed by partition of image into overlapping block and each block is partitioned into non-overlapping cells. Next, Adaptive Thresholding Mean Ternary Pattern Descriptor (ATMTP) is applied on each cell to produce six ATMTP codes and finally, the tested image is classified. In the next part of the scheme, detected forgery object in the spliced image involves five major steps. Initially, similarity among every neighbouring district is computed and the two most comparable areas are assembled together to the point that the entire picture turns into a single area. Secondly, merge similar regions according to specific state, which satisfies the condition of fewer than four pixels between similar regions that lead to obtaining the desired regions to represent objects that exist in the spliced image. Thirdly, select random blocks from the edge of the binary image based on the binary mask. Fourthly, for each block, the Gabor Filter feature is extracted to assess the edges extracted of the segmented image. Finally, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to classify the images. Evaluation of the scheme was experimented using three sets of standard datasets, namely, the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) version TIDE 1.0 and 2.0, and Columbia University. The results showed that, the ATMTP achieved higher accuracy of 98.95%, 99.03% and 99.17% respectively for each set of datasets. Therefore, the findings of this research has proven the significant contribution of the scheme in improving image forgery detection. It is recommended that the scheme be further improved in the future by considering geometrical perspective

Qualitative Failures of Image Generation Models and Their Application in Detecting Deepfakes

The ability of image and video generation models to create photorealistic images has reached unprecedented heights, making it difficult to distinguish between real and fake images in many cases. However, despite this progress, a gap remains between the quality of generated images and those found in the real world. To address this, we have reviewed a vast body of literature from both academic publications and social media to identify qualitative shortcomings in image generation models, which we have classified into five categories. By understanding these failures, we can identify areas where these models need improvement, as well as develop strategies for detecting deep fakes. The prevalence of deep fakes in today's society is a serious concern, and our findings can help mitigate their negative impact

An improved discrete cosine transformation block based scheme for copy-move image forgery detection

Copy-moved forgery is a common method to manipulate images. Several attempts of image forgery have been discovered and involves a region been duplicated and copied and pasted on another region of the same image in other to achieve selfish gain. Generally, there are two classification of copy-move forgery detection technique such as the block-based and key point-based. The block-based division is mostly used and divides image into blocks during the stage of image pre-processing before features are extracted, whereas key-point based technique skips the division of image into blocks and directly extracts different local feature from the image. In this paper, we review various block based and key point approach which has been proposed by various researchers. There is a problem of achieving a balance between improving the detection accuracy and having minimal computational complexity. The proposed technique is based on an improved DCT based copy-move image forgery detection (IDB-CFD), which involves using an octagonal block to reduce the number of features for matching, thereby improving detection accuracy while having minimal complexity. The analysis of this work as compared to previous proposed works which is based on a robust detection algorithm for copy-move image forgery (RDA-CF) and involves using circle block to reduce the number of features, results show that previous work represents about 79% of the quantized DCT coefficients on each image block and this proposed work represents about 85% of quantized DCT coefficients, therefore, recovery of about 6% more features using the IDB-CFD technique was observed as the improvement over the previously proposed RDA-CF

Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview

With the rapid progress of recent years, techniques that generate and manipulate multimedia content can now guarantee a very advanced level of realism. The boundary between real and synthetic media has become very thin. On the one hand, this opens the door to a series of exciting applications in different fields such as creative arts, advertising, film production, video games. On the other hand, it poses enormous security threats. Software packages freely available on the web allow any individual, without special skills, to create very realistic fake images and videos. So-called deepfakes can be used to manipulate public opinion during elections, commit fraud, discredit or blackmail people. Potential abuses are limited only by human imagination. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automated tools capable of detecting false multimedia content and avoiding the spread of dangerous false information. This review paper aims to present an analysis of the methods for visual media integrity verification, that is, the detection of manipulated images and videos. Special emphasis will be placed on the emerging phenomenon of deepfakes and, from the point of view of the forensic analyst, on modern data-driven forensic methods. The analysis will help to highlight the limits of current forensic tools, the most relevant issues, the upcoming challenges, and suggest future directions for research

Security of Forensic Techniques for Digital Images

Digital images are used everywhere in modern life and mostly replace traditional photographs. At the same time, due to the popularity of image editing tools, digital images can be altered, often leaving no obvious evidence. Thus, evaluating image authenticity is indispensable. Image forensic techniques are used to detect forgeries in digital images in the absence of embedded watermarks or signatures. Nevertheless, some legitimate or illegitimate image post-processing operations can affect the quality of the forensic results. Therefore, the reliability of forensic techniques needs to be investigated. The reliability is understood in this case as the robustness against image post-processing operations or the security against deliberated attacks. In this work, we first develop a general test framework, which is used to assess the effectiveness and security of image forensic techniques under common conditions. We design different evaluation metrics, image datasets, and several different image post-processing operations as a part of the framework. Secondly, we build several image forensic tools based on selected algorithms for detecting copy-move forgeries, re-sampling artifacts, and manipulations in JPEG images. The effectiveness and robustness of the tools are evaluated by using the developed test framework. Thirdly, for each selected technique, we develop several targeted attacks. The aim of targeted attacks against a forensic technique is to remove forensic evidence present in forged images. Subsequently, by using the test framework and the targeted attacks, we can thoroughly evaluate the security of the forensic technique. We show that image forensic techniques are often sensitive and can be defeated when their algorithms are publicly known. Finally, we develop new forensic techniques which achieve higher security in comparison with state-of-the-art forensic techniques

A Real-time Inertial Motion Blur Metric: Application to Frame Triggering Based Motion Blur Minimization

Mobile robots suffer from sensory data corruption due to body oscillations and disturbances. In particular, information loss on images captured with onboard cameras can be very high, and such loss may become irreversible or computationally costly to undo. In this paper, we propose a novel method to minimize average motion blur captured by such mobile visual sensors. To this end, we derive a motion blur metric (MMBM) that can be computed in real-time by using only inertial sensor measurements and validate it through comparisons with optic flow computations. The applicability of MMBM is illustrated through a motion blur minimizing system implemented on the SensoRHex hexapod robot by externally triggering an onboard camera based on MMBM values computed in real-time while the robot is walking straight on a flat surface. The resulting motion blur is compared to motion blur levels obtained with a regular, fixed frame-rate image acquisition schedule by both qualitative inspection and using a blind blur metric on captured images. MMBM based motion blur minimization system not only reduces average motion blur, but also avoids frames with extreme motion blur before an image gets corrupted by appropriately delaying the triggering of frame acquisition