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A fast copy-move image forgery detection approach on a reduced search space

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Abstract

This paper proposes an overlapping block-based passive forensic scheme for copy–move forgery detection in digital images that works on a reduced search space. It uses a Gaussian image pyramid to generate and analyze input images at different resolutions. The conventional overlapping block-based procedures produce satisfactory results but are highly compute-intensive for large and medium-sized images. An increase in image size leads to a rapid rise in the number of overlapping blocks in the image, making processes like feature extraction, matching, and shift-vector calculations very expensive. The proposed approach initially performs relative forgery detection through block-wise processing of lower resolution components of the original image. In this process, discrete cosine transform is used to extract significant coefficients from each block and further analyzed to identify forgeries relatively in the selected lower resolution components. This process aids in selecting a smaller search space for potentially forged areas in the original image. Finally, the actual forgery detection is performed on this reduced search space, decreasing the computational overhead while maintaining accuracy in the results. The proposed procedure also shows robustness against various attacks and post-processing operations.

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Data Availability

The self-generated dataset used to analyze the current study is included within the article and is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The current study analysis also referred to and used a subset of the dataset D0 created by [3].

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank the Department of Science & Technology (DST), New Delhi, for supporting this work under FIST project grant (No. SR/FST/ET-I/ 2017/75).

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, 826004, Jharkhand, India

    Srilekha Paul & Arup Kumar Pal

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Paul, S., Pal, A.K. A fast copy-move image forgery detection approach on a reduced search space. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 25917–25944 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-14224-w

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