An efficient forensic technique for exposing region duplication forgery in digital images

The internet users share a massive amount of digital images daily. The accessibility of powerful image manipulation tools has made the integrity of image contents questionable. The most popular image tampering is to duplicate a region elsewhere in the same image to replicate or conceal some other region. The duplicated regions have identical color and texture attributes that make this artifact invisible to the human eye. Therefore, efficient techniques are required to verify the credibility of image contents by detecting the regions duplicated in the digital images. This paper proposes an efficient technique for exposing region duplication forgery in digital images. The proposed technique divides the approximation (LL) sub-band of shift invariant stationary wavelet transform into overlapping blocks of w x w (i.e. w = 4, 8) sizes. The distinctive features extracted from the overlapping blocks are utilized to expose the region duplication forgeries in digital images. The experimental results of the proposed technique are compared with state-of-the-art techniques that reveal the prominence, and effectiveness of the proposed technique in terms of precision, recall and F (1) score for different block sizes. Therefore, the proposed technique can reliably be applied to identify the counterfeited regions and the benefits of the proposed technique can be achieved in different fields for example crime investigation, news reporting, and judiciary.