ISSN: 2277 – 9043

International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (IJARCSEE)
Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2013

Analysis of Copy-Move Image Forgery

Detection
Prof. Unmukh Datta, Chetna Sharma


Abstract— Image forgery detection systems have been
developed according to the conditions imposed by many
applications. Detecting forgery is related to the technique
used in forgery through the help of image processing tools.
For this purpose the tampered images are followed by many
steps in respect of forgery detection. Different types of image
forgeries are seen nowadays. Therefore many forgery
detection systems have exhibited in advancement of theses
image forgery fields. In this survey paper we have described
recent development in the field of Copy-Move image forgery
detection.
Index Terms— Image forgeries, Digital forensics, Copy-
Move forgery detection.
II. COPY-MOVE IMAGE FORGERY
Copy-Move Image forgery is mostly used to disappear some
objects from the image by copying some part of the image
and pasting that part on the other part of the same image.
By doing so, it become hard to detect forgery with human
eyes because copied parts come from the same image. After
modification if retouching tool is also applied then it
becomes even hard to detect through technology. Therefore
the detection systems are needed to be more efficient.

I. INTRODUCTION
Highlight a section that Digital Image Forgery is a very
important field in image processing. It is important because
digital images are used in many social areas like in courts
when they are used as evidence, medical imaging and
journalism. The availability of powerful software tools such
as Photoshop makes easy to manipulate the digital images.
Over the past ten years, the field of digital forensics has
proceeded in helping return some trust to digital images.
Different techniques for maintaining the integrity of digital
images have been developed. These techniques can be
divided into two groups: intrusive and non-intrusive. In
intrusive (active) techniques, some sort of signature
(watermark, extrinsic fingerprint) is embedded into a Fig1. An example of copy-image forgery [12]: a) Original
digital image, and authentication is done by verifying if the image b) Forged image
true signature matches the retrieved signature from the test An example of Copy-Move image forgery is given below
image. Non-intrusive techniques exploit different kinds of (Fig 1). In the figure, copy-move forgery is done on the
intrinsic fingerprints such as sensor noise of the capturing tower. If we see only Fig1 (b) image then the forgery cannot
device or image specific detectable changes for detecting be identified with human eyes. The main reason is that the
forgery. There are three types of image forgery; Copy- copied part belongs to the same image therefore mostly
Move, Image splicing and Image retouching. 1) In Copy- important properties are congruous with the rest of the
Move Forgery, one part of the image is copied and that part image. In copy-move image forgery the correlation between
is pasted on other part of the same image to cover an the copied and moved segment is to be detected.
important scene of the image. 2) In Image-Splicing, two
images are combined to create one tampered image. 3) In III. DETECTION TECHNIQUES OF COPY-MOVE IMAGE
Image Retouching the image is less modified. It just FORGERY
enhances some features of the image. Ethically it’s also So many techniques have been developed for the Copy-
wrong. move image forgery. These techniques employ different
algorithms. To detect forgery the techniques are divided in
two groups based on the algorithm used by them. One
algorithm is based on exact matching and other algorithm
 is based on approx matching. The first one is called
Manuscript received on 13 August, 2012.
Prof. Unmukh Datta, Computer Science and Engineering, M.P.C.T. exhaustive algorithm and the second one is called
Gwalior, India autocorrelation algorithm.
Chetna Sharma, Computer Science and Engineering, M.P.C.T.
Gwalior, India.
607
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (IJARCSEE)
IV. EXHAUSTIVE APPROACH
Exhaustive approach is simplest approach of detection. In
this approach the image and its circularly shifted
translation are completely covered to find closely matching
image segments. Assuming an gray image of scale M×N
which has pixel value xij at position (i,j). Then according to Even different techniques for comparisons among these
exhaustive approach following differences are considered
| xij – xi+k mod(M) j+l mod(N) |, k = 0, 1, …, M–1, l = 0,
1, …, N–1 for all i and j.
For each circular shift [k,l], the differences Δxij = | xij – for detection systems of copy-move forgery. Success of
xi+k mod(M) j+lmod(N) |, are calculated. This method is
computationally expensive and impractical for medium
sized images. The comparison and image processing
require the order of MN operations for one
shift. Thus, the total computational requirements are
proportional to (MN)2.
V. AUTOCORRELATION APPROACH
In autocorrelation approach the image is divided in
overlapping blocks. The idea is to correlate copy and moved
image segment. For this purpose different techniques are
applied. The distance between duplicated pair blocks would
be same. From these blocks some features are extracted for
the comparisons. Researchers use different features to
represent image blocks. These blocks are then sorted
lexicographically manner for further detection.
Fig. 2. Copy-Move image forgery detection system
configuration
In figure 2 the autocorrelation approach is defined through
its steps in a flow diagram. Although, this method is simple
All Rights Reserved © 2013 IJARCSEE
ISSN: 2277 – 9043
Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2013
and does not have a large computational complexity, it
often fails to detect the forgery. The computational time
depends upon factor such as number of blocks, sorting
techniques and the number of feature. Different approaches
are applied for sorting and extracting features from blocks.
pairs of blocks is applied which can increase efficiency of
detection system.
Over last 10 years several approaches have been developed
these detection systems depends on many factors such as
complexity, cost, accuracy and sensitivity. These Factors
affect performance of system. For these purposes following
quantities are calculated for each technique.
TP (true positive): forged blocks declared forged
FP (false positive): genuine blocks declared forged
TN (true negative): genuine blocks declared genuine
FN (false positive): forged blocks declared genuine
These quantities describe the effectiveness of copy-move
forgery detection techniques.
Results are then given in terms of sensitivity, specificity
and accuracy, computed as
Sensitivity = TP / (TP + FN)
Specificity = TN / (TN + FP)
Accuracy = (TN + TP ) / (TN + FP + TP + FN)
which measure, respectively, the ability to detect the
presence of forgery, the ability to confirm the absence of
forgery, and the overall classification accuracy, independent
of the nature of the blocks. On the basis of above features
the analysis of detection techniques is done.
VI. COPY-MOVE IMAGE FORGERY DETECTION WORK
First method for Copy-move forgery detection was
suggested by Fridrich et al. [1]. In this method firstly the
image was divided into overlapping segments and then
feature extraction of these blocks was done by applying
DCT. These blocks were then sorted lexicographically to
find the similarity.
After then A.C.Popescu et. al. [2] applied a principle
component analysis (PCA) on small fixed-size image to
yield a reduced dimension discrete cosine transform(DCT)
block representation. Each block was vectorized and matrix
was constructed. By finding the eigenvectors of the
covariance matrix, a new linear basis was obtained. Then
sorting the blocks lexicographically, duplicate regions are
detected. This method was robust to compression up to
JPEG quality level 50 and the time complexity of sorting
was O(32x k lg k) time.
Jing Zhang et al. [3] proposed an approach based on the
idea of pixel-matching to locate copy-move regions. In this
approach, DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) was applied
to the input image to yield a reduced dimension
representation. Then the phase correlation is computed to
estimate the spatial offset between the copied and the pasted
region. Pixel matching is done to locate copy-move region,
which is shifting the input image according to the spatial
offset and calculating the difference between the image and
its shifted version. At the end, Mathematical Morphological
Operations are used to remove isolated points so as to
improve the location. The proposed technique has lower
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering (IJARCSEE)
computational complexity and it is reasonably robust to
various types of Copy-Move post processing.
G. Li et. al. [4] proposed a method which reduced the time
complexity for sorting to O(8k lg k) time. The image was
decomposed into four sub-bands by applying discrete
wavelet transform (DWT). The singular value
decomposition (SVD) was then applied on these blocks of
low-frequency component in wavelet sub-band to yield a
reduced dimension representation. Then matrix of SV
vectors is sorted lexicographically to detect duplicate
region.
W. Luo et al. [5] suggested a method based on the pixel
block characteristics. The image was first divided into
small overlapped blocks and measured block characteristics
vector form each block. Then the possible duplicate region
was detected by comparing the similarity of the block.
H. Huang et al. [6] presented a method to detect region
duplication based on local image statistical features known
as scale invariant features transform (SIFT). SIFT
descriptors of an image are invariant to changes in
illumination, rotation, scaling etc. First the SIFT
descriptors of the image is extracted, and descriptors are
then matched between each other to seek for any possible
forgery in images. Even though this method enables to
detect duplication, this scheme still have a limitation on
detection performance since it is only possible to extract the
keypoints from peculiar points of the image
B.L. Shivakumar et al. [7], In this method Harris Interest
Point detector was used to detect the corners along with
SIFT descriptors to detect copy - move forgery and then
KD-Tree was used for matching the features. This method
was not robust to rotation and noise.
G. Muhammad et al. [8], recently presented a method in
which Dyadic wavelet transform is used. It is also shift
invariant therefore more suitable. For feature extraction
DCT is used and then Euclidian distance is calculated for
block matching so that copy-move region is located. This
method is robust to rotation.
VII. CONCLUSION
As copy-move forgeries have become very common
nowadays. So the detection of such forgeries has become
very important. So many techniques have been developed
but still more robust forgery detection technique needed to
be developed. These techniques faces mainly three major
challenges: tampered images with compression, tampered
images with noise, and tampered images with rotation. We
have reviewed several research papers in this survey paper
to enlighten the development in the field of copy-move
forgery detection. This field is still growing and a lot of
research is needed to make Digital forensic more
promising.
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All Rights Reserved © 2013 IJARCSEE
ISSN: 2277 – 9043
Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2013
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