An image forensic technique based on JPEG ghosts

The unprecedented growth in the easy availability of photo-editing tools has endangered the power of digital images. An image was supposed to be worth more than a thousand words, but now this can be said only if it can be authenticated or the integrity of the image can be proved to be intact. In this paper, we propose a digital image forensic technique for JPEG images. It can detect any forgery in the image if the forged portion called a ghost image is having a compression quality different from that of the cover image. It is based on resaving the JPEG image at different JPEG qualities, and the detection of the forged portion is maximum when it is saved at the same JPEG quality as the cover image. Also, we can precisely predict the JPEG quality of the cover image by analyzing the similarity using Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) or the energy of the images. The first maxima in SSIM or the first minima in energy correspond to the cover image JPEG quality. We created a dataset for varying JPEG compression qualities of the ghost and the cover images and validated the scalability of the experimental results. We also, experimented with varied attack scenarios, e.g. high-quality ghost image embedded in low quality of cover image, low-quality ghost image embedded in high-quality of cover image, and ghost image and cover image both at the same quality. The proposed method is able to localize the tampered portions accurately even for forgeries as small as 10 × 10 sized pixel blocks. Our technique is also robust against other attack scenarios like copy-move forgery, inserting text into image, rescaling (zoom-out/zoom-in) ghost image and then pasting on cover image.