While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

The Act of Creation

One of the principal problems in image forensics is determining if a particular image is authentic or not. This can be a crucial task when images are used as basic evidence to influence judgment like, for example, in a court of law. To carry out such forensic analysis, various technological instruments have been developed in the literature. In this paper, the problem of detecting if an image has been forged is investigated; in particular, attention has been paid to the case in which an area of an image is copied and then pasted onto another zone to create a duplication or to cancel something that was awkward. Generally, to adapt the image patch to the new context a geometric transformation is needed. To detect such modifications, a novel methodology based on scale invariant features transform (SIFT) is proposed. Such a method allows us to both understand if a copy-move attack has occurred and, furthermore, to recover the geometric transformation used to perform cloning. Extensive experimental results are presented to confirm that the technique is able to precisely individuate the altered area and, in addition, to estimate the geometric transformation parameters with high reliability. The method also deals with multiple cloning.

A SIFT-Based Forensic Method for Copy–Move Attack Detection and Transformation Recovery

We are undoubtedly living in an age where we are exposed to a remarkable array of visual imagery. While we may have historically had confidence in the integrity of this imagery, today's digital technology has begun to erode this trust. From the tabloid magazines to the fashion industry and in mainstream media outlets, scientific journals, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that land in our e-mail in-boxes, doctored photographs are appearing with a growing frequency and sophistication. Over the past five years, the field of digital forensics has emerged to help restore some trust to digital images. The author reviews the state of the art in this new and exciting field.

Image forgery detection

A copy-move forgery is created by copying and pasting content within the same image, and potentially postprocessing it. In recent years, the detection of copy-move forgeries has become one of the most actively researched topics in blind image forensics. A considerable number of different algorithms have been proposed focusing on different types of postprocessed copies. In this paper, we aim to answer which copy-move forgery detection algorithms and processing steps (e.g., matching, filtering, outlier detection, affine transformation estimation) perform best in various postprocessing scenarios. The focus of our analysis is to evaluate the performance of previously proposed feature sets. We achieve this by casting existing algorithms in a common pipeline. In this paper, we examined the 15 most prominent feature sets. We analyzed the detection performance on a per-image basis and on a per-pixel basis. We created a challenging real-world copy-move dataset, and a software framework for systematic image manipulation. Experiments show, that the keypoint-based features Sift and Surf, as well as the block-based DCT, DWT, KPCA, PCA, and Zernike features perform very well. These feature sets exhibit the best robustness against various noise sources and downsampling, while reliably identifying the copied regions.

An Evaluation of Popular Copy-Move Forgery Detection Approaches

Region duplication is a simple and effective operation to create digital image forgeries, where a continuous portion of pixels in an image, after possible geometrical and illumination adjustments, are copied and pasted to a different location in the same image. Most existing region duplication detection methods are based on directly matching blocks of image pixels or transform coefficients, and are not effective when the duplicated regions have geometrical or illumination distortions. In this work, we describe a new region duplication detection method that is robust to distortions of the duplicated regions. Our method starts by estimating the transform between matched scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) keypoints, which are insensitive to geometrical and illumination distortions, and then finds all pixels within the duplicated regions after discounting the estimated transforms. The proposed method shows effective detection on an automatically synthesized forgery image database with duplicated and distorted regions. We further demonstrate its practical performance with several challenging forgery images created with state-of-the-art tools.

Region Duplication Detection Using Image Feature Matching

http://zoi.utia.cas.cz/files/copy_move.pdf

Detection of copy–move forgery using a method based on blur moment invariants

In this paper, we analyze and analytically describe the specific statistical changes brought into the covariance structure of signal by the interpolation process. We show that interpolated signals and their derivatives contain specific detectable periodic properties. Based on this, we propose a blind, efficient, and automatic method capable of finding traces of resampling and interpolation. The proposed method can be very useful in many areas, especially in image security and authentication. For instance, when two or more images are spliced together, to create high quality and consistent image forgeries, almost always geometric transformations, such as scaling, rotation, or skewing are needed. These procedures are typically based on a resampling and interpolation step. By having a method capable of detecting the traces of resampling, we can significantly reduce the successful usage of such forgeries. Among other points, the presented method is also very useful in estimation of the geometric transformations factors.

/pdf/blind-authentication-using-periodic-properties-of-2xg5krd8q5.pdf

Blind Authentication Using Periodic Properties of Interpolation

Using noise inconsistencies for blind image forensics

Verifying the integrity of digital images and detecting the traces of tampering without using any protecting pre-extracted or pre-embedded information have become an important and hot research field. The popularity of this field and the rapid growth in papers published during the last years have put considerable need on creating a complete bibliography addressing published papers in this area. In this paper, an extensive list of blind methods for detecting image forgery is presented. By the word blind we refer to those methods that use only the image function. An attempt has been made to make this paper complete by listing most of the existing references and by providing a detailed classification group.

/pdf/a-bibliography-on-blind-methods-for-identifying-image-zvgfbnc80m.pdf

A bibliography on blind methods for identifying image forgery

Verifying the integrity of digital images and detecting the traces of tampering without using any protecting pre-extracted or pre-embedded information has an important role in image forensics and crime detection. When altering a JPEG image, typically it is loaded into a photo-editing software and after manipulations are carried out, the image is re-saved. This operation, typically, brings into the image specific artifacts. In this paper we focus on these artifacts and propose an automatic method capable of detecting them. (6 pages)

/pdf/detecting-double-compressed-jpeg-images-2l5frd0dok.pdf

Babak Mahdian

Papers

Detection of copy–move forgery using a method based on blur moment invariants

Blind Authentication Using Periodic Properties of Interpolation

Using noise inconsistencies for blind image forensics

A bibliography on blind methods for identifying image forgery

Detecting double compressed JPEG images