Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images

Xufeng Lin; Xingjie Wei; Chang-Tsun Li

doi:10.1117/12.2038644

19 February 2014 Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images

Xufeng Lin, Xingjie Wei, Chang-Tsun Li

Proceedings Volume 9028, Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics 2014; 90280X (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2038644
Event: IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging, 2014, San Francisco, California, United States

Abstract

Contrast enhancements, such as histogram equalization or gamma correction, are widely used by malicious attackers to conceal the cut-and-paste trails in doctored images. Therefore, detecting the traces left by contrast enhancements can be an effective way of exposing cut-and-paste image forgery. In this work, two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images are put forward. More specifically, the first method uses a quadratic weighting function rather than a simple cut-off frequency to measure the histogram distortion introduced by contrast enhancements, meanwhile the averaged high-frequency energy measure of his- togram is replaced by the ratio taken up by the high-frequency components in the histogram spectrum. While the second improvement is achieved by applying a linear-threshold strategy to get around the sensitivity of threshold selection. Compared with their original counterparts, these two methods both achieve better performance in terms of ROC curves and real-world cut-and-paste image forgeries. The effectiveness and improvement of the two proposed algorithms are experimentally validated on natural color images captured by commercial camera.

Citation Download Citation

Xufeng Lin, Xingjie Wei, and Chang-Tsun Li "Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images", Proc. SPIE 9028, Media Watermarking, Security, and Forensics 2014, 90280X (19 February 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2038644

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