Exposing Digital Forgeries by Detecting Duplicated Image Regions

A.C. Popescu and H. Farid

Technical Report, TR2004-515, Dartmouth College, Computer Science

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We describe an efficient technique that automatically detects duplicated regions in a digital image. This technique works by first applying a principal component analysis to small fixed-size image blocks to yield a reduced dimension representation. This representation is robust to minor variations in the image due to additive noise or lossy compression. Duplicated regions are then detected by lexicographically sorting all of the image blocks. We show the efficacy of this technique on credible forgeries, and quantify its robustness and sensitivity to additive noise and lossy JPEG compression.