A SURVEY ON COPY MOVE FORGERY
DETECTION TECHNIQUES
J T Pramod#, Sreedhar Rajput #
#
ECE Department, MITS,
Madanapalle, A.P
1pramodjt@mits.ac.in
2sreedharrajput@gmail.com
Abstract— Digital images are a powerful tool of
communication medium now a days. Image authenticity
is very much important because it is going to be used in
many areas such as law firms, medical sciences, media
etc. as a proof. But due to the advanced technologies
available now it’s very easy to manipulate the image
which is termed as forgery. Copy move forgery is the
type of image forgery in which one part of the image is
hidden by covering with some other part of the same
image. This copy move forgery detection is one of the
most progressive research topic now a days. Several
algorithms to detect this type of forgery have been
proposed. In this paper evaluation of the performance of
different techniques to detect copy move forgery is done
by considering different metrics.
Index Terms—forgery, tool, progressive research,
metrics. (Key words)
I. INTRODUCTION
From past few decades images have become the
proof of occurrence of the events in life. Due to the
diversification of use of computers in different fields
of modern life has given a very much importance to
the digital images. Low cost and great availabilities of
hardware and software tools made the image
operations such as creating, editing and manipulating
the images more easy now a days. Hence to consider
the image as a proof or evidence is not justifiable. The
authenticity of digital images has now become
volatile. This situation made it questionable the use
digital images as a proof in law, in forensic science, in
sports, in news and in business etc. Hence the
detection of forgeries in digital images has become an
emerging research topic now a days. Copy move
image forgery is the type of image forgery in which
both the source and target regions are from the same
image, hence both the parts contains same values for
properties such as brightness, illumination etc. the
forgery detection in digital images are broadly
classified in to two types namely active approaches
and passive approaches. Active approaches are digital
image watermarking and signature analysis.
Both these techniques require an external input to
be verified. This method is not very much suited for
all types of images because there are so many images
in internet available without any signature incurred in
it. Passive approaches are much suitable to these type
of images because they doesn’t require any external
input except input required to detect the forgery in
images. There are three techniques widely used in
manipulating the digital image. They are image
retouching, image slicing and copy move forgery.
Image retouching doesn’t alter the major portion of the
image. Image splicing is the process of adding two
different images to create a new image. Currently in
this paper we are discussing about detection of copy
move forgery.
II. COPY-MOVE FORGERY
Copy move forgery is the type of image forgery in
which a part of the image is overridden by some
another part of the same image. Here both the source
and target part of the image are parts of the same
image. The example of copy move image forgery is
shown in the below figure.
Fig 1(a): Original Image Fig 1(b): Tampered Image
In the above figures, fig (a) is the original image
and the fig (b) is the tampered image .in fig (b) the top
middle flower is covered by the greenery in the image.
Copy-Move forgery is performed with the intention to
make an object “disappear” from the image by
covering it with a small block copied from another part
of the same image. Since the copied segments come
from the same image, the color palette, noise
components, dynamic range and the other properties
will be compatible with the rest of the image, thus it is
very difficult for a human eye to detect. There are
many approaches are proposed to detect the copy
move forgery in digital images. One of the simplest
approach is performing exhaustive search.
In this approach the image is overlaid by its
circularly shifted version and search for approximate
matching parts of image is done. This method is
simple and more suitable for small images. For an
image with dimensions (M x N) it will take (MN)2
steps to complete the testing. Hence this method is
computationally expensive for medium and large
dimensional images. Other technique used is
autocorrelation for copy move forgery. Since the
forged part of the image is also from the same image
there is a correlation between original and duplicated
regions. Although this method is simple practically it
fails in detection of copy move forgery.
 III. BLOCK-BASED ALGORITHMS
Now other approach for detecting copy move
forgery is block matching procedure. Here in this
approach the image is divided into overlapping blocks
and each block is compared based on some of the
features extracted from it with the remaining. The idea
here is to detect connected blocks that are copied and
moved. The copied region would consist many
overlapping blocks. The distance between each
duplicated block pair would be same since each block
are moved with same amount of shift. The next step is
to extract the feature from each block. Here the
duplicated block and source block will have almost
similar values of the features then the extracted
features are vectorised and placed in a matrix. This
matrix is lexicographically sorted and then the vectors
with almost similar values are grouped together,
which represents the copied and moved blocks in the
image. This block matching procedure is explained as
below.
Input image
Divide into
overlapping blocks
Feature Extraction
Lexicographical
sorting
Locating the copy
move forgery
Detection result
Fig 2: Block matching procedure
The Feature Extraction methods using block-based
approach are mainly categorized in to four categories.
They are dimensionality reduction based, and
frequency domain-based, intensity-based and moment
based features.
A. Dimensionality reduction-based
Dimensionality reduction based methods uses PCA
(Principle Component Analysis) and KPCA (Kernel-
PCA). Computed the singular values of a reduced-
rank approximation (SVD).
B. PCA and KPCA
PCA is a method that projects a dataset to a new
coordinate system by determining the eigenvectors
and eigenvalues of a matrix. It involves calculation of
covariance matrix of a dataset to minimize the
redundancy and maximize the variance. The PCA is
computed by determining the eigenvectors and
eigenvalues of the covariance matrix. The covariance
matrix is used to measure how much the dimensions
vary from the mean with respect to each other. The
covariance of two random variables (dimensions) is
their tendency to vary together as:
𝑐𝑜𝑣(𝑋; 𝑌) = 𝐸[𝐸[𝑋] − 𝑋] . 𝐸[𝐸[𝑌] − 𝑌] (1)
Where E[X] and E[Y] denote the expected value of X
and Y respectively.
KPCA (Kernel-PCA) proposed by Bashar et al.
Kang et al. Kernel PCA (KPCA) was derived from
PCA as a nonlinear feature extraction method,
Theoretically, KPCA may be viewed as a combination
of the following two procedures: the first procedure
implicitly transforms the input space into a higher-
dimensional feature space, and the second one carries
out PCA in the feature space. By virtue of so-called
kernel functions, KPCA is computationally tractable
compared to other nonlinear methods.
C. Intensity-based
The intensity based feature extraction approach
used to perform the average of red, green and blue
components generally. Additionally dimensional
information of blocks (LUO) method is proposed by
Luo et al. Bravo-Solorio et al., proposed a method
which calculate the entropy of a block as a
discriminating feature (BRAVO). Lin et al. (LIN)
computed the average grayscale intensities of a block
and its sub-blocks. Wang et al. used the mean
intensities of circles with different radii around the
block center (CIRCLE).
D. Frequency based
Frequency based algorithms uses DCT, DWT and
FMT to perform feature extraction. They are
explained briefly below.
1) DCT: Fridrich et al., proposed the use of 256
coefficients of the discrete cosine transform (DCT) as
features [1]. , the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)
attempts to decorrelate the image data. After
decorrelation each transform coefficient can be
encoded independently without losing the
Compression efficiency. Decorrelation, Energy
Compaction, seperability and symmetry are the four
distinct properties of the DCT that makes the feature
extraction more efficient. The 2-D DCT functions
which can be applied to image are given by,
Forward transform:
𝑀−1 𝑁−1
2 (2𝑖 + 1)𝑚𝜋 (2𝑗 + 1)𝑛𝜋
𝑋(𝑚, 𝑛) = 𝑢(𝑚)𝑢(𝑛) ∑ ∑ 𝑥(𝑖, 𝑗)𝑐𝑜𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑠 ,
𝑁 2𝑀 2𝑁
𝑖=0 𝑗=0
𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑚 = 0,1, … . , 𝑀 − 1, 𝑛 = 0,1, … . , 𝑁 − 1. (2)
Inverse transform:
𝑀−1 𝑁−1
2 (2𝑖 + 1)𝑚𝜋 (2𝑗 + 1)𝑛𝜋
𝑥(𝑖, 𝑗) = ∑ ∑ 𝑢(𝑚)𝑢(𝑛)𝑋(𝑚, 𝑛) cos 𝑐𝑜𝑠 ,
𝑁 2𝑀 2𝑁
𝑚=0 𝑛=0
𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑖 = 0,1, … . , 𝑀 − 1, 𝑗 = 0,1, … . , 𝑁 − 1. (3)
Where X (m, n) are the DCT Coefficients and x(i,j) are same value even if the image is rotated to a particular
the image samples in block. Here we consider the angle.
image size as MxN.
The discrete cosine transform is calculated for each IV. KEY POINT-BASED ALGORITHMS
block and stored in a row of matrix which contains the Unlike block-based algorithms, key point-based
coordinates of the block starting point at the end of the methods rely on the identification and selection of
row. Then this matrix is sorted lexicographically and high-entropy image regions (i.e. the “key points”). A
the rows which are having same values are treated as feature vector is then extracted per key point.
copied regions and those blocks are highlighted as Consequently, fewer feature vectors are estimated,
forged parts. resulting in reduced computational complexity of
2) DWT: The coefficients of a discrete wavelet feature matching and post-processing. The lower
transform (DWT) using Haar-Wavelets were number of feature vectors dictates that post processing
proposed as features by Bashar et al. [3]the wavelet thresholds are also to be lower than that of block-based
transform gives the analysis of the data both in time as methods. A drawback of key point methods is that
well as frequency domains. The technique proposed copied regions are often only sparsely covered by
by Jing Zhang et al [9] works by applying DWT to matched key points. If the copied regions exhibit little
input image to yield a reduced dimension structure, it may happen that the region is completely
representation. Then the phase correlation is missed. We examined two different versions of key
computed to estimate the spatial offset between the point based feature vectors. One uses the SIFT
copied region and the pasted region. The copy-move features while the other uses the SURF features they
regions can then be located by the idea of pixel are denoted as SIFT and SURF, respectively [4][7].
matching, which is shifting the input image according Comparison of different algorithms based on feature
to the spatial offset and calculating the difference vector length is done in below table.
between image and its shifted version. SIFT: The SIFT approach, for image feature
generation, takes an image and transforms it into a
The DWT transform also reduces the
"large collection of local feature vectors" the f local
dimensionality of the image based on the scaling
features extracted through the following three stages,
factor we consider. This will gives a better
explained here shortly
performance in data compression. The DWT used to
project the image in to frequency domain and the sub- TABLE I
band which contains maximum information is selected
COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS
(most likely LL sub-band) and then these values are
stored in a matrix and that matrix is lexicographically Feature
GROUP Methods
sorted and the rows with similar values are get traced vector length
and the blocks of image corresponds to that rows are BLUR 24
considered as the forged parts of the image. Moments HU 5
ZERNIKE 12
3) FMT: Bayram et. al [8] suggested a method by PCA -
Dimensionality
applying Fourier Mellin Transform (FMT) on the SVD -
reduction
image block. They first obtained the Fourier transform KPCA 192
representation of each block, re-sampled the resulting LUO 7
magnitude values into log-polar coordinates. Then BRAVO 4
Intensity
they obtained a vector representation by projecting LIN 9
CIRCLE 8
log-polar values onto 1-D and used these
DCT 256
representations as our features.
Frequency DWT 256
E. Moment based FMT 45
SIFT 128
Key point
1) Blur invariant moments: These moments are SURF 64
proposed by Mahdian and Saic.[8] This method used
to identify the copied part even though it is blurred to Here by analyzing the fig (2) and fig (3) we notice
isolate the edge discontinuities. Generally, relation that the DCT and DWT methods have highest length
between the ideal image f and the observed image g is of feature vector followed by KPCA. The larger the
described as 𝑔 = 𝐷 (𝑓), where D is a degradation length of feature vector the more accurate detection
operator. In the case of a linear shift-invariant imaging capability the method have. But it has the time
system, D usually has a form of limitation since having larger feature vector length
𝑔 = 𝜏 (𝑓 ) ∗ ℎ + 𝑛 (4)
will take more time for detection.
where h is the point-spread function (PSF) of the
system, n is an additive random noise. We want to
define a function which again reproduces f from g.
That type of function is applied to each and every
block and the coefficients are stored in a matrix and
comparison of the so obtained values is done to find
out the copied and forged parts of the image.
2) Zernike moments: Ryu et al [9] proposed the
use of Zernike moments. These Zernike moments are
the rotation invariant moments which are having the
 Comparison Chart
300 256 256
192
200
100 24
5 12
0 neighborhood approach for detecting duplicated regions in
Fig (3): Chart comparison of different algorithms
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper we reviewed several papers to know
the recent development in the field of Copy-Move
digital image forgery detection. All the methods which
have been suggested draw strengths from different
transforms to make them robust against post
processing and to reduce the number of logical blocks
to compare. Different feature extraction techniques
which provides the detection capability of different
moves to hide the forgery are discussed. DCT, DWT
and FMT are frequency domain feature extraction
techniques. In these methods feature extraction is done
by using 2-D forward transforms and the feature
vectors are calculated. The FMT algorithms works for
the case of only slight rotation. Blur invariant
moments and Zernike moments are the blur and
rotation invariant feature extraction techniques. The
above mentioned techniques are block matching
techniques. Also selection of block size poses
problem, Two Key point based methods are also
proposed, they are SIFT and SURF. Applied these
techniques on forged images and the results are
recorded for the purpose of evaluating which
technique works better for which type of image. These
different methods proposed diversify the process of
forgery detection in digital images. Sophisticated tools
and advanced manipulation techniques have made
forgery detection a challenging one. Digital image
forensic is still a growing area and lot of research
needed to be done.
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