Detection of purple fringing aberration patterns and its application to forensic analysis of spliced images

Morphing, fusion and stitching of digital photographs from multiple sources is a common problem in the recent era. While images may depict visual normalcy despite a splicing operation, there are domains in which a consistency or an anomaly check can be performed to detect a covert digital stitching process. Most digital and low-end mobile cameras have certain intrinsic sensor aberrations such as purple fringing (PF), seen in image regions where there are contrast variations and shadowing. This paper proposes an approach based on Fuzzy clustering to first identify regions which contain Purple Fringing and is then used as a forensic tool to detect splicing operations. The accuracy of the Fuzzy clustering approach is comparable with the state-of-the-art PF detection methods and has been shown to penetrate standard interpolation and stitching operations performed using ADOBE PHOTOSHOP.