DNN-STACK: a stacking technique based on deep neural network for detecting copy-move forgery

In recent years, detecting image forgery has become an important topic because of the availability of efficient and sophisticated image-editing software. Copy-move forgery, which involves copying a section of an image and pasting it to a different location inside the same image, is one of the most popular tampering techniques that alter the identity of a given image. This paper presents DNN-STACK, a deep neural network-based stacking scheme to identify copy-move forgery by effectively combining the predictions yielded by different base-level models. To extract hierarchical representations from the given images and generate base-level predictions, the proposed approach uses five distinct but complementary deep learning-based base-level models. After that, a consensus prediction is generated using the proposed DNN-STACK model, which can infer the nonlinear relationship between the base-level predictions. Experimental evaluation on three publicly available datasets, such as MICC-F600, MICC-F2000, and FAU, reveals the fact that the proposed DNN-STACK model outperforms the existing forgery detection techniques, significantly improving detection accuracy across varying image resolutions and attack types, including rotation, scaling, noise, and compression levels. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2024.