Frame deletion detection based on optical flow orientation variation

Abstract

Frame deletion detection is an arrestive field for video forensics in recent years. This paper presents a frame deletion detection algorithm based on optical flow orientation variation. Optical flow field has been proved to be effective for the detection of the frame deletion operation. However, current optical-flow based methods have relatively poor detection performance for real-world videos. Our research aims to develop a new forensic method to detect frame deletion for real-world videos. The proposed algorithm firstly develops an analytical model for flow orientation variation between adjacent optical flow fields, and exhibits a novel forensic clue for frame deletion detection, under an ideal but reasonable assumption. Accordingly, an effective descriptor, namely pseudo flow orientation variation (PFOV), is created to approximate the flow orientation variation, as a discriminative description feature to capture the frame deletion trace. The Frobenius norm and a smooth function are also introduced to quantify each descriptor to form an one-dimensional time series, and further statistics technique is adopted to detect the anomalous points in the time series caused by frame deletion. In addition, to improve the descriptor performance, the Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) is applied to extract moving objects from video sequences and compute the proposed descriptor on them. The tests are made on 324 real-world videos, and experiment results demonstrate that the true positive rate can reach 90.12%, meanwhile the false alarm rate is 7.71%, which indicates the superiority of the proposed method in the forensic algorithms for real-world video.