Exposing Digital Forgeries by Detecting Traces of Re-sampling

A.C. Popescu and H. Farid

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 53(2):758-767, 2005

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The unique stature of photographs as a definitive recording of events is being diminished due, in part, to the ease with which digital images can be manipulated and altered. Although good forgeries may leave no visual clues of having been tampered with, they may, nevertheless, alter the underlying statistics of an image. For example, we describe how re-sampling (e.g., scaling or rotating) introduces specific statistical correlations, and describe how these correlations can be automatically detected in any portion of an image. This technique works in the absence of any digital watermark or signature. We show the efficacy of this approach on uncompressed TIFF images, and JPEG and GIF images with minimal compression. We expect this technique to be among the first of many tools that will be needed to expose digital forgeries.