An investigation of approaches for image forgery detection

Abstract: Trustworthiness of digital images has a significant role in many areas, but the ease with which they can be manipulated and distributed has brought forth the security aspects. The easy accessibility of sophisticated photo editing tools has made the process of verifying the authenticity and integrity of digital images extremely difficult. There is an urgent need to develop novel image forgery detection techniques and also improve the high false positive rates of the existing methods. The current paper presents an overview of various approaches available in literaturefor tamper detection, along with their strengths and weaknesses. As lot of research has been carried out in the field of active andpassive tamper detection, the focus of this paper is to highlight the role of fusion in the field of image tamper detection. As the research in this direction has been very limited, all methods that detect tampering on the basis of multiple cues (foot prints or tampering traces) are grouped together and are termed as fusion based approaches. Image tamper detection techniques can be made more reliable and robust by using fusion of multiple tamper detection tools. A critical review of available fusion is presented to expedite the development of novel image forensic techniques.

Keywords: passive-blind methods, image forensics, tamper detection, image forgery, intrusive techniques