Signal Processing Algorithms For Digital Image Forensics

Abstract

Availability of digital cameras in various forms and user-friendly image editing softwares has enabled people to create and manipulate digital images easily. While image editing can be used for enhancing the quality of the images, it can also be used to tamper the images for malicious purposes. In this context, it is important to question the originality of digital images. Digital image forensics deals with the development of algorithms and systems to detect tampering in digital images. This thesis presents some simple algorithms which can be used to detect tampering in digital images. Out of the various kinds of image forgeries possible, the discussion is restricted to photo compositing (Photo montaging) and copy-paste forgeries. While creating photomontage, it is very likely that one of the images needs to be resampled and hence there will be an inconsistency in some of its underlying characteristics. So, detection of resampling in an image will give a clue to decide whether the image is tampered or not. Two pixel domain techniques to detect resampling have been presented. The rest of them exploits the property of periodic zeros that occur in the second divergences due to interpolation during resembling. It requires a special condition on the resembling factor to be met. The second technique is based on the periodic zero-crossings that occur in the second divergences, which does not require any special condition on the resembling factor. It has been noted that this is an important property of revamping and hence the decay of this technique against mild counter attacks such as JPEG compression and additive noise has been studied. This property has been repeatedly used throughout this thesis. It is a well known fact that interpolation is essentially low-pass filtering. In case of photomontage image which consists of resample and non resample portions, there will be an in consistency in the high-frequency content of the image. This can be demonstrated by a simple high-pass filtering of the image. This fact has also been exploited to detect photomontaging. One approach involves performing block wise DCT and reconstructing the image using only a few high-frequency coercions. Another elegant approach is to decompose the image using wavelets and reconstruct the image using only the diagonal detail coefficients. In both the cases mere visual inspection will reveal the forgery. The second part of the thesis is related to tamper detection in colour filter array (CFA) interpolated images. Digital cameras employ Bayer filters to efficiently capture the RGB components of an image. The output of Bayer filter are sub-sampled versions of R, G and B components and they are completed by using demosaicing algorithms. It has been shown that demos icing of the color components is equivalent to resembling the image by a factor of two. Hence, CFA interpolated images contain periodic zero-crossings in its second differences. Experimental demonstration of the presence of periodic zero-crossings in images captured using four digital cameras of deferent brands has been done. When such an image is tampered, these periodic zero-crossings are destroyed and hence the tampering can be detected. The utility of zero-crossings in detecting various kinds of forgeries on CFA interpolated images has been discussed. The next part of the thesis is a technique to detect copy-paste forgery in images. Generally, while an object or a portion if an image has to be erased from an image, the easiest way to do it is to copy a portion of background from the same image and paste it over the object. In such a case, there are two pixel wise identical regions in the same image, which when detected can serve as a clue of tampering. The use of Scale-Invariant-Feature-Transform (SIFT) in detecting this kind of forgery has been studied. Also certain modifications that can to be done to the image in order to get the SIFT working effectively has been proposed. Throughout the thesis, the importance of human intervention in making the final decision about the authenticity of an image has been highlighted and it has been concluded that the techniques presented in the thesis can effectively help the decision making process.