Recent Advances in Passive Digital Image Security Forensics: A Brief Review

Abstract

With the development of sophisticated image editing and manipulation tools, the originality and authenticity of a digital image is usually hard to determine visually. In order to detect digital image forgeries, various kinds of digital image forensics techniques have been proposed in the last decade. Compared with active forensics approaches that require embedding additional information, passive forensics approaches are more popular due to their wider application scenario, and have attracted increasing academic and industrial research interests. Generally speaking, passive digital image forensics detects image forgeries based on the fact that there are certain intrinsic patterns in the original image left during image acquisition or storage, or specific patterns in image forgeries left during the image storage or editing. By analyzing the above patterns, the originality of an image can be authenticated. In this paper, a brief review on passive digital image forensic methods is presented in order to provide a comprehensive introduction on recent advances in this rapidly developing research area. These forensics approaches are divided into three categories based on the various kinds of traces they can be used to track—that is, traces left in image acquisition, traces left in image storage, and traces left in image editing. For each category, the forensics scenario, the underlying rationale, and state-of-the-art methodologies are elaborated. Moreover, the major limitations of the current image forensics approaches are discussed in order to point out some possible research directions or focuses in these areas. Keywords: Digital image forensics, Image-tampering detection, Multimedia security