Blind method for rescaling detection and rescale factor estimation in digital images using periodic properties of interpolation

Availability of the powerful image editing softwares and advancement in digital cameras has given rise to large amount of manipulated images without any traces of tampering, generating a great demand for automatic forgery detection algorithms in order to determine its authenticity. When altering an image like copy–paste or splicing to conceal traces of tampering, it is often necessary to resize the pasted portion of the image. The resampling operation may highly likely disturb the underlying inconsistency of the pasted portion that can be used to detect the forgery. In this paper, an algorithm is presented that blindly detects global rescaling operation and estimate the rescaling factor based on the autocovariance sequence of zero-crossings of second difference of the tampered image. Experimental results using UCID and USC-SIPI database show the validity of the algorithm under different interpolation schemes. The technique is robust and successfully detects rescaling operation for images that have been subjected to various forms of attacks like JPEG compression and arbitrary cropping. As expected, some degradation in detection accuracy is observed as the JPEG quality factor decreased.