Splicing forgery localization via noise fingerprint incorporated with CFA configuration

Forensic Sci Int. 2022 Nov:340:111464. doi: 10.1016/j.forsciint.2022.111464. Epub 2022 Sep 11.

Abstract

Noise is the inherent intrinsic fingerprint in digital images and is often used for forgery localization. Most noise-based methods assume that the noise is similar over the whole image and can be considered as white Gaussian noise. However, the noise is different in various regions, which degrade the performance of these noise-based methods. To reduce the impact of impractical assumptions, in this paper, we propose an effective noise fingerprint incorporated with CFA configuration for splicing forgery localization. The noise of interpolated pixels is expected to be suppressed after interpolation, and the relationship between the noise levels of adjacent acquired and interpolated pixels is only related to the interpolation algorithm, which is constant in the original image. We utilize a dual tree wavelet based denoising algorithm to extract the noise from the green channel and compute the standard deviation of the noise for acquired and interpolated pixels, respectively. The noise level of acquired and interpolated pixels are then obtained by the geometric mean of the noise standard deviations. Finally, the ratio of noise levels between acquired and interpolated pixels can be a fingerprint to locate tampered regions. Experiments conducted on publicly available databases demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms previous methods for detecting splice tampering. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to Gaussian filtering and JPEG compression attacks.

Keywords: CFA configuration; Digital image forensics; Forgery localization; Noise estimation.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*