Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images

Abstract

Digital images are easy to manipulate and edit due to availability of powerful image processing and editing software. Nowadays, it is possible to add or remove important features from an image without leaving any obvious traces of tampering. As digital cameras and video cameras replace their analog counterparts, the need for authenticating digital images, validating their content, and detecting forgeries will only increase. Detection of malicious manipulation with digital images (digital forgeries) is the topic of this paper. In particular, we focus on detection of a special type of digital forgery - the copy-move attack in which a part of the image is copied and pasted somewhere else in the image with the intent to cover an important image feature. In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting the copy-move forgery and describe an efficient and reliable detection method. The method may successfully detect the forged part even when the copied area is enhanced/retouched to merge it with the background and when the forged image is saved in a lossy format, such as JPEG. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on several forged images.