An Evaluation of Popular Copy-Move Forgery Detection Approaches

A copy-move forgery is created by copying and pasting content within the same image, and potentially post-processing it. In recent years, the detection of copy-move forgeries has become one of the most actively researched topics in blind image forensics. A considerable number of different algorithms have been proposed focusing on different types of postprocessed copies. In this paper, we aim to answer which copy-move forgery detection algorithms and processing steps (e.g., matching, filtering, outlier detection, affine transformation estimation) perform best in various postprocessing scenarios. The focus of our analysis is to evaluate the performance of previously proposed feature sets. We achieve this by casting existing algorithms in a common pipeline. In this paper, we examined the 15 most prominent feature sets. We analyzed the detection performance on a per-image basis and on a per-pixel basis. We created a challenging real-world copy-move dataset, and a software framework for systematic image manipulation. Experiments show, that the keypoint-based features SIFT and SURF, as well as the block-based DCT, DWT, KPCA, PCA and Zernike features perform very well. These feature sets exhibit the best robustness against various noise sources and downsampling, while reliably identifying the copied regions.Comment: Main paper: 14 pages, supplemental material: 12 pages, main paper appeared in IEEE Transaction on Information Forensics and Securit

Progressive Feedback-Enhanced Transformer for Image Forgery Localization

Blind detection of the forged regions in digital images is an effective authentication means to counter the malicious use of local image editing techniques. Existing encoder-decoder forensic networks overlook the fact that detecting complex and subtle tampered regions typically requires more feedback information. In this paper, we propose a Progressive FeedbACk-enhanced Transformer (ProFact) network to achieve coarse-to-fine image forgery localization. Specifically, the coarse localization map generated by an initial branch network is adaptively fed back to the early transformer encoder layers for enhancing the representation of positive features while suppressing interference factors. The cascaded transformer network, combined with a contextual spatial pyramid module, is designed to refine discriminative forensic features for improving the forgery localization accuracy and reliability. Furthermore, we present an effective strategy to automatically generate large-scale forged image samples close to real-world forensic scenarios, especially in realistic and coherent processing. Leveraging on such samples, a progressive and cost-effective two-stage training protocol is applied to the ProFact network. The extensive experimental results on nine public forensic datasets show that our proposed localizer greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the generalization ability and robustness of image forgery localization. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/multimediaFor/ProFact

MSMG-Net: Multi-scale Multi-grained Supervised Metworks for Multi-task Image Manipulation Detection and Localization

With the rapid advances of image editing techniques in recent years, image manipulation detection has attracted considerable attention since the increasing security risks posed by tampered images. To address these challenges, a novel multi-scale multi-grained deep network (MSMG-Net) is proposed to automatically identify manipulated regions. In our MSMG-Net, a parallel multi-scale feature extraction structure is used to extract multi-scale features. Then the multi-grained feature learning is utilized to perceive object-level semantics relation of multi-scale features by introducing the shunted self-attention. To fuse multi-scale multi-grained features, global and local feature fusion block are designed for manipulated region segmentation by a bottom-up approach and multi-level feature aggregation block is designed for edge artifacts detection by a top-down approach. Thus, MSMG-Net can effectively perceive the object-level semantics and encode the edge artifact. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets justify the superior performance of the proposed method, outperforming state-of-the-art manipulation detection and localization methods. Extensive ablation experiments and feature visualization demonstrate the multi-scale multi-grained learning can present effective visual representations of manipulated regions. In addition, MSMG-Net shows better robustness when various post-processing methods further manipulate images

Digital forensic techniques for the reverse engineering of image acquisition chains

In recent years a number of new methods have been developed to detect image forgery. Most forensic techniques use footprints left on images to predict the history of the images. The images, however, sometimes could have gone through a series of processing and modification through their lifetime. It is therefore difficult to detect image tampering as the footprints could be distorted or removed over a complex chain of operations. In this research we propose digital forensic techniques that allow us to reverse engineer and determine history of images that have gone through chains of image acquisition and reproduction. This thesis presents two different approaches to address the problem. In the first part we propose a novel theoretical framework for the reverse engineering of signal acquisition chains. Based on a simplified chain model, we describe how signals have gone in the chains at different stages using the theory of sampling signals with finite rate of innovation. Under particular conditions, our technique allows to detect whether a given signal has been reacquired through the chain. It also makes possible to predict corresponding important parameters of the chain using acquisition-reconstruction artefacts left on the signal. The second part of the thesis presents our new algorithm for image recapture detection based on edge blurriness. Two overcomplete dictionaries are trained using the K-SVD approach to learn distinctive blurring patterns from sets of single captured and recaptured images. An SVM classifier is then built using dictionary approximation errors and the mean edge spread width from the training images. The algorithm, which requires no user intervention, was tested on a database that included more than 2500 high quality recaptured images. Our results show that our method achieves a performance rate that exceeds 99% for recaptured images and 94% for single captured images.Open Acces

Texture based Image Splicing Forgery Recognition using a Passive Approach

With the growing usage of the internet in daily life along with the usage of dominant picture editing software tools in creating forged pictures effortlessly, make us lose trust in the authenticity of the images. For more than a decade, extensive research is going on in the Image forensic area that aims at restoring trustworthiness in images by bringing various tampering detection techniques. In the proposed method, identification of image splicing technique is introduced which depends on the picture texture analysis which characterizes the picture areas by the content of the texture. In this method, an image is characterized by the regions of their texture content. The experimental outcomes describe that the proposed method is effective to identify spliced picture forgery with an accuracy of 79.5%