Global contrast enhancement based image forensics using statistical features

Abstract

The evolution of modern cameras, mobile phones equipped with sophisticated image editing software has revolutionized digital imaging. In the process of image editing, contrast enhancement is a very common technique to hide visual traces of tampering. In our work, we have employed statistical distribution of block variance and AC DCT coefficients of an image to detect global contrast enhancement in an image. The variation in statistical parameters of block variance and AC DCT coefficients distribution for different degrees of contrast enhancement are used as features to detect contrast enhancement. An SVM classifier with 10-fold cross-validation is employed. An overall accuracy greater than 99% in detection with false rate less than 2% has been achieved. The proposed method is novel and it can be applied to uncompressed, previously JPEG compressed and post enhancement JPEG compressed images with high accuracy. The proposed method does not employ oft-repeated image histogram-based approach.