Copy-move image forgery detection based on Gabor magnitude

• An efficient and robust detection algorithm for image copy move forgery is proposed.
• The histogram of orientated Gabor magnitude is proposed for the extraction of image features.
• We developed a noise detector to reduce the probability of false matches.
• The proposed method is effective in dealing with images distorted by different post-processing.

With advancement of media editing software, even people who are not image processing experts can easily alter digital images. Various methods of digital image forgery exist, such as image splicing, copy-move forgery, and image retouching. The most common method of tampering with a digital image is copy-move forgery, in which a part of an image is duplicated and used to substitute another part of the same image at a different location. In this paper, we present an efficient and robust method to detect such artifacts. First, the tampered image is segmented into overlapping fixed-size blocks, and the Gabor filter is applied to each block. Thus, the image of Gabor magnitude represents each block. Secondly, statistical features are extracted from the histogram of orientated Gabor magnitude (HOGM) of overlapping blocks, and reduced features are generated for similarity measurement. Finally, feature vectors are sorted lexicographically, and duplicated image blocks are identified by finding similarity block pairs after suitable post-processing. To enhance the algorithm’s robustness, a few parameters are proposed for removing the wrong similar blocks. Experiment results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to detect multiple examples of copy-move forgery and precisely locate the duplicated regions, even when dealing with images distorted by slight rotation and scaling, JPEG compression, blurring, and brightness adjustment.