An Efficient Detection Algorithm for Copy-Move Forgery

The most common method of tampering with a digital image is copy-move forgery, in which a part of an image is duplicated and used to substitute another part of the same image at a different location. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust method to detect such artifacts. First, the tampered image is segmented into overlapping fixed-size blocks, and the Gabor filter is applied to each block. Thus, the image of Gabor magnitude represents each block. Secondly, statistical features are extracted from the histogram of orientated Gabor magnitude (HOGM) of overlapping blocks, and reduced features are generated for similarity measurement. Finally, feature vectors are sorted lexicographically, and duplicated image blocks are identified by finding similarity block pairs after suitable post-processing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect multiple examples of copy-move forgery and locate precisely the duplicated regions, even when dealing with images distorted by translation, rotation, JPEG compression, blurring, and brightness adjustment.