Detection copy-move forgery in image via quaternion polar harmonic transforms

Abstract

Copy-move forgery (CMF) in digital images is a detrimental tampering of artefacts that requires precise detection and analysis. CMF is performed by copying and pasting a part of an image into other portions of it. Despite several efforts to detect CMF, accurate identification of noise, blur and rotated region-mediated forged image areas is still difficult. A novel algorithm is developed on the basis of quaternion polar complex exponential transform (QPCET) to detect CMF and is conducted involving a few steps. Firstly, the suspicious image is divided into overlapping blocks. Secondly, invariant features for each block are extracted using QPCET. Thirdly, the duplicated image blocks are determined using k-dimensional tree (kd-tree) block matching. Lastly, a new technique is introduced to reduce the flat region-mediated false matches. Experiments are performed on numerous images selected from the CoMoFoD database. MATLAB 2017b is used to employ the proposed method. Metrics such as correct and false detection ratios are utilised to evaluate the performance of the proposed CMF detection method. Experimental results demonstrate the precise and efficient CMF detection capacity of the proposed approach even under image distortion including rotation, scaling, additive noise, blurring, brightness, colour reduction and JPEG compression. Furthermore, our method can solve the false match problem and outperform existing ones in terms of precision and false positive rate. The proposed approach may serve as a basis for accurate digital image forensic investigations.