Image Forgery Localization via Block-Grained Analysis of JPEG Artifacts

In this paper, we propose a forensic algorithm to discriminate between original and forged regions in JPEG images, under the hypothesis that the tampered image presents a double JPEG compression, either aligned (A-DJPG) or non-aligned (NA-DJPG). Unlike previous approaches, the proposed algorithm does not need to manually select a suspect region in order to test the presence or the absence of double compression artifacts. Based on an improved and unified statistical model characterizing the artifacts that appear in the presence of both A-DJPG or NA-DJPG, the proposed algorithm automatically computes a likelihood map indicating the probability for each $8 \times 8$ discrete cosine transform block of being doubly compressed. The validity of the proposed approach has been assessed by evaluating the performance of a detector based on thresholding the likelihood map, considering different forensic scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also confirmed by tests carried on realistic tampered images. An interesting property of the proposed Bayesian approach is that it can be easily extended to work with traces left by other kinds of processing.