Enhanced copy-paste forgery detection in digital images using scale-invariant feature transform

Image forgery detection and localisation is one of the principal problems in digital forensics. Copy-paste forgery in digital images is a type of forgery in which an image region is copied and pasted at another location within the same image. In this work, the authors propose a methodology to detect and localise copy-pasted regions in images based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT). Existing copy-paste forgery detection in images using SIFT and clustering techniques such as hierarchical agglomerative and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise resulted many false pixel detections. They have introduced sensitivity-based clustering along with SIFT features to identify copy-pasted pixels and disregard the false pixels. Experimental evaluation on public image datasets MICC-F220, MICC-F2000 and MICC-F8 multi shows that the proposed method is showing improved performance in detecting and localising copy-paste forgeries in images than the existing works. Also the proposed work detects multiple copy-pasted regions in the images and is robust to attacks such as geometrical transformation of copied regions such as scaling and rotation.