Color Channel Characteristics (CCC) for Efficient Digital Image Forensics

Abstract

Digital image forgery has become extremely easy as low-cost image processing programs are readily available. Digital image forensics is a science of classifying images as authentic or manipulated. This paper aims at implementing a novel digital image forensics technique by exploiting an image’s Color Channel Characteristics (CCC). The CCCs considered are the noise and edge characteristics of the image. Averaging, median, Gaussian and Wiener filters along with Sobel, Canny, Prewitt and Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) edge detectors are applied to get the noise and texture features. A complete, no reference, blind classifier for image tamper detection has been proposed and implemented. The proposed CCC classifier can detect copy-move as well as image splicing accurately with lower dimensionality. Support Vector Machine is used for classification of images as authentic or tampered. Experimental results have shown that the proposed technique outperforms the existing ones and may serve as a complete tool for digital image forensics.