A fast keypoint based hybrid method for copy move forgery detection

Abstract

Copy move forgery detection in digital images has become a very popular research topic in the area of image forensics. Due to the availability of sophisticated image editing tools and ever increasing hardware capabilities, it has become an easy task to manipulate the digital images. Passive forgery detection techniques are more relevant as they can be applied without the prior information about the image in question. Block based techniques are used to detect copy move forgery, but have limitations of large time complexity and sensitivity against affine operations like rotation and scaling. Keypoint based approaches are used to detect forgery in large images where the possibility of significant post processing operations like rotation and scaling is more. A hybrid approach is proposed using different methods for keypoint detection and description. Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) are used to detect the keypoints in the image and Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints (BRISK) features are used to describe features at these keypoints. The proposed method has performed better than the existing forgery detection method using SURF significantly in terms of detection speed and is invariant to post processing operations like rotation and scaling. The proposed method is also invariant to other commonly applied post processing operations like adding Gaussian noise and JPEG compression.