A generalized Benford's law for JPEG coefficients and its applications in image forensics

In this paper, a novel statistical model based on Benford's law for the probability distributions of the first digits of the block-DCT and quantized JPEG coefficients is presented. A parametric logarithmic law, i.e., the generalized Benford's law, is formulated. Furthermore, some potential applications of this model in image forensics are discussed in this paper, which include the detection of JPEG compression for images in bitmap format, the estimation of JPEG compression Q-factor for JPEG compressed bitmap image, and the detection of double compressed JPEG image. The results of our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed statistical model.