Digital forensic technique for double compression based JPEG image forgery detection

Abstract

In today’s cyber world images and videos are the major sources of information exchange. The authenticity of digital images and videos is extremely crucial in the legal industry, media world and broadcast industry. However, with huge proliferation of low-cost, easy-to-use image manipulating software the fidelity of digital images is at stake. In this paper we propose a technique to detect digital forgery in JPEG images, based on ”double-compression”. We deal with JPEG images because JPEG is the standard storage format used in almost all present day digital cameras and other image acquisition devices. JPEG compresses an image to optimize the storage space requirement. When an attacker or criminal alters some part of a JPEG image by any image-editing tool and rewrites it to memory, the forged or modified part gets doubly-compressed. In this paper, we exploit this double-compression in JPEG images to identify digital forgery.