Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020)

IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP20K74-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4876-2

Image Forgery Detection and Deep Learning

Techniques: A Review
1st Ritu Agarwal 2nd Deepak Khudaniya 3rd Abhinav Gupta
Department of Information technology Department of Information technology Department of Information technology
Delhi Technological University Delhi Technological University Delhi Technological University
Shahbad Daulatpur, Main Bawana Road Shahbad Daulatpur, Main Bawana Road Shahbad Daulatpur, Main Bawana Road
Delhi 110042, India Delhi 110042, India Delhi 110042, India
ritu.jeea@gmail.com deepakkhudaniya bt2k16@dtu.ac.in gupta.abhinav2010@gmail.com

4th Khyati Grover

Department of Computer Engineering
Delhi Technological University
Shahbad Daulatpur, Main Bawana Road
Delhi 110042, India
khyati.grover@yahoo.com

Abstract—Due to the easily available software for tampering
images, image manipulation has become quite common. Since the
tampered images are non-distinguishable by the naked eye, they
are being circulated on various platforms giving rise to rumors
and misleading many. This has led researchers to work on
various techniques for the detection of manipulated images with
improved accuracy. Traditional works on image forgery detection
are mostly based on extracting simple features that are specific
for detecting some particular type of forgery. Recently, works on
forgery detection based on neural networks have proved to be
very efficient in detecting image forgery. Neural networks are
capable of extracting complex hidden features of an image, thus
giving better accuracy. Contrary to the traditional methods of
forgery detection, a deep learning model automatically builds the
required features, hence it has become the new area of research in
image forgery. The paper initially discusses various types of image
forgery techniques and later on compares different approaches
involving neural networks to identify forged images.
Index Terms—Copy move forgery, Image splicing,
Convolutional neural network, Deep neural network
I. INT RODUCT ION
The emergence and widespread usage of social media
platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc. have
increased the number of images being uploaded and shared on
these platforms. These images are used to spread informat ion
to a widespread audience and hence helps to form public
opinion on a large scale. Due to this underlying property of
forming mass opinions and easily available photo and video
editing tools, many false images are circulated on these
platforms daily. Not only on social media, but tampered
images are also used in courtrooms, scientific journals,
literature works, etc. Image forgery is a term that refers to
man ipulating or tampering the original image to hide some
useful information or to showcase some false information. The
purpose behind creating forged images could range from
earning money, spreading rumors, or making false claims in
one’s favor. Due to t h e widespread use of images and
serious consequences
of forged images, many types of research have been done to
detect manipulated images. Active approaches for forgery
detection which include digital signatures and watermarking
suffer fro m the drawback of inserting the watermark or the
signature beforehand in the image which limits the scenarios
where this technique would work. Various approaches have
been proposed for passive based forgery detection. Popescu
Farid [10] described a method for detecting duplicate regions
present in an image by apply ing PCA to blocks of images and
then sorting the blocks lexicographically. Amerini et al.
[1] has used a SIFT based approach that solves the two-fold
purpose of detecting the copy move forgery and to fetch the
geometric transformation applied to build the forged image.
Wei et al. [12] proposed a rotation angle estimation method
that can detect splicing forgery. The algorithm is capable of
blind detection of geometrical operations performed and to
detect foreign areas present in t h e forged image. Ke et al.
[7] used a technique to detect forged images by determin ing
the consistency of shadow. It assumes that the tampered image
has an inconsistent shadow due to splicing. The method has a
shortcoming that it only works for forged images with shadow.
Another method to identify forgery in images with reflect ions
is developed by Farid [9] which detects geometrical
inconsistencies based on 3-Dimensional geo metry, reflection,
and projection rules. Most of these methods involve the use of
structural or geo metrical properties of images to ext ract
features. Image forgery detection methods that involve the use
of deep learning techniques have become very popular
nowadays. These approaches do not consider any statistical or
geometrical calculations but tend to construct a model that
automatically ext racts useful features to perform the
classification. The use of convolution neural networks has
shown very good results over image manipulation detection.
The paper presents an overview of basic concepts of image
forgery and various research methodologies involving deep
learning adopted so

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP20K74-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4876-2

far for image forgery detection. The paper is div ided into the image sources. However, more than two image sources can
following sections. Section 2 discusses various techniques of also exist.
image forgery detection. Section 3 presents an overview and
general structure of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN).
Various research approaches for manipulat ion detection using
CNN are co mpared and contrasted in section 4. The
conclusion of the paper is presented in Section 5.

II. IMAGE FORGERY T E CHNIQUES

To check an image for its originality, it is impo rtant to
understand various existing techniques of image forgery. These
techniques are broadly classified into active and passive
techniques that are further classified.

Fig. 1. Image forgery techniques

A. Active approach
In the active approach of fo rgery detection, the image is
pre-processed and some cipher key is inserted in the image.
The received image is authenticated by the use of that key
[11]. So me examp les of act ive approaches include digital
watermarking and signatures.

B. Passive approach
In this type of forgery detection method, no pre-processing
of the image is required. It is based on the fact that tampering
the original image results in producing inconsistencies within
Fig. 2. Image Splicing
its statistical properties or pixel intensities. These
inconsistencies are detected to find whether the image has
tampered or not. This technique is more popular than an active Copy move forgery
approach because of the non-requirement of any prior
As the name itself indicates, this type of forgery involves
informat ion of the image. This is further classified into two
copying one part of image and pasting it in some other
types-forgery independent and forgery dependent. Forgery location. The purpose is main ly to hide some important
dependent methods detect a specific type of forgeries whereas information in the image.
forgery independent methods detect forgery independent of
their type. 2) Forgery independent: Image retouching
1) Forgery dependent: These techniques are classified into This is the most widely used and most easy to do form
copy-move and image splicing. of image tampering wherein the features of the image are
Image splicing changed in order to produce tampered image. Th is may involve
Splicing refers to cutting out a part of one image and putting rotation, resizing, changing the brightness, sharpness, color
it in the other, thus the tampered image is produced by a contrast etc of the image.
combination of two images. The produced image has two

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Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP20K74-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4876-2

III. BASIC CNN A RCHIT ECT URE

CNN has recently become very popular due to their ability
to learn the features of an image. They are widely being
emp loyed in image recognition and image processing tasks.
Hence, many types of research for identifying image forgery
are based on CNN.

Fig. 5. Basic CNN Architecture

CNN has recently become very popular due to their ability

to learn the features of an image. They are widely being
emp loyed in image recognition and image processing tasks.
Hence, many types of research for identifying image forgery
are based on CNN. Most CNN architectures are formed by a
combination o f one input and output layer, few convolution
Fig. 3. Copy move forgery
layers, and fu lly connected layers. Fig 5 shows a basic CNN
architecture. The input image is visualized as a matrix of
pixels. The matrix values are fed to the input layer which is
composed of many units. Before feeding the matrix values to
the input layer, these values are multiplied by the filter values
and then summed up. The filter slides over the input image to
produce the input matrix. While sliding, the corresponding
cells in the input matrix and filter are mu ltip lied and their sum
is fed into the output matrix. After this, a pooling operation is
done. The pooling can be max-pooling, average-pooling, or
global-pooling. The process is shown in fig 6.
In this way, the feature map is generated which is fed into
the input layer and the output is generated by applying the
activation function to the input. Activation functions such as
relu, sig moid, tanh, etc are widely used. CNN uses a pooling
layer which reduces the dimension of the data and serves the
dual purpose of reducing the enormous amount of output to be
fed into the next input layer and by losing some in formation,
the problem of overfitting is solved. After passing through a
series of hidden layers and pooling layers, the data goes into
mu ltip le fu lly connected layers where classification is
performed. Finally, in the output layer, the error is calculated
which is then propagated backward in the network to update
the weights of the filter. Thus, a series of feedforward and
backpropagation is done to minimize the error and train the
network.
I V. COMPARAT IVE ST UDY OF FORGERY IDENT IFICAT ION
Fig. 4. Image Retouching T E CHNIQUES USING NEURAL NET WORKS
The research method involves the use of CNN for the
detection of spliced, retouching, and recomp ressed images [6].
The CNN

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number:CFP20K74-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-4876-2

T ABLE I

Paper T argeted Forgery Features Layers Dataset Performance

Accuracy
Huang et al., Splicing, Retouching, and 5 Convolution Layers 95%(Spliced)
2018 [6] Recompressing Softmax Classifier CASIA v1.0 93%(Retouched)
2 Fully Connected Layers
71%(R ec om press)
Kim & Lee Median Filtering, Gaussian 2 Convolution Layers
Blurring, AWG N, High Pass Filter 2 Pooling Layers 1000 Images of Accuracy:95%
(2017) [8] Boss Base 1.01
Image Resizing 2 Fully Connected Layers.
Bayar & Median Filtering, Gaussian 1 newly proposed Collected from 12
Prediction Error 2 convolution layers
Stamm Blurring, AWGN, different camera Accuracy:99.10%
Filters 2 max pooling
(2017) [2] Resampling models.
3 fully connected layers.
Zhang et al. Distinguishes forged and original Works well on low- Accuracy:
2 Convolution Layers CASIA 2.0 85.35%(JPEG)
(2018) [13] edges of images resolution images. 2 Fully Connected Layers
82.93%(TIFF)
Hema Rajni Uses BDCT and CASIA v1.0 Accuracy(99.03%)
Copy move and Splicing —- T PR(98.91%)
(2019) [5] ZM Polar CASIA v2.0
TNR( 99.16% )
CASIA v1.0 Accuracy:
Zhou et al. Effective in JPG 7 Convolution Layers CASIA v2.0 97.62%(CASIA v1.0)
(2017) [14] Splicing Compression Columbia Image
2 Pooling Layers 97.87%(CASIA v2.0)
Forgery Database 96.38%(Columbia dataset)

produced by median filtering. Hence, some researches [8,2]

Fig. 6. Convolution operation and max-pooling
use additional filters or additional layers along with CNN to
extract the hidden features in an image. One approach using a
High Pass filter [8]. A high pass filter, wh ich is capable of
extracting hidden features from the image is applied to the
input image before feeding it into the input layer of CNN.
Also, the Local response normalizat ion (LRN) layer is applied
after the pooling layer to standardize the brightness. Another
approach involves using a new convolution layer along with
the traditional convolution layer [2]. Manipulation of an image
changes the local structural relat ionships of the pixels if not the
content of the image. Hence, a new convolution layer is used
to draw out those structural features which are independent of
the image’s content. Bayar & Stamm [2] used prediction error
filters to specifically draw out manipulation detection features.

The above approaches work well on high-resolution images

architecture is co mposed of 5 convolution layers, 2 fully
connected layers along with a softmax classifier. For g radient
descent, stochastic gradient descent with mo mentu m (SGDM)
optimizer was chosen. The method observes an accuracy of
95%, 93%, and 71% accuracy in detecting spliced, retouched,
and recompressed images when trained and tested over CASIA
v1.0 [3] dataset. The dataset was divided into training and
testing set and accuracy was determined as how many
percentages of testing images were classified correctly.
However, some researchers [2, 4] suggest using only CNN for
image forgery detection is not effective because CNN only
learns semantics or the content of the image. It is unable to
identify forged images that do not change the content of the
image. For examp le, when forged images are p roduced by
algorith ms such as Median Filter, Gaussian Blur, Additive
white Gaussian noise addition (AWGN), and Re-Samp ling in
which contents of the image remain the same, using CNN
alone doesn’t give the desired results. This effect was observed
in [4] where CNN alone was not able to detect forged images
but are not as effective on low-resolution images because
these approaches rely on sharpness of edges or resampling
features [13]. Thus, a novel approach based on fast shallow
CNN is proposed in [13] for detecting the boundaries of
forged images in low-resolution images. The main difference
has tampered and original low- resolution images are in their
chroma and saturation. Since the research focuses only on the
edges, the CNN model has co mposed of two convolutions and
two fully connected layers along with skipping the pooling
layer. Also, 20% of the filters use Laplacian kernels to ext ract
resampling features and informat ion fro m edges. To localize
the tampered region, the basic approach is to use sliding
window detection which ext racts patches fro m the orig inal
image and feed them into the Shallow Convolutional Neural
Network (SCNN), but this has a high time co mplexity,
therefore fast SCNN approach as discussed in [13] feeds entire
image in convolution layers to get feature vectors and then
extract patches fro m the feature vectors to input into fully
connected layers and constructing probability map.
However, this kind

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 Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control Systems (ICICCS 2020)
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of approach works for only low-resolution images.
Another approach proposes the use of CNN co mb ined with
ZM-polar (Zernike mo ment) and block discrete cosine
transform (BDCT) in fo rgery detection and classification of
the type of forgery [5]. The image is converted to YCbCr form
and to which de -correlation and BDCT are applied to generate
feature vector set for the first CNN which classifies the image
as original or fo rged. Another CNN model is trained to classify
the image as copy-move or spliced. In the case of copy-move,
features are ext racted using a circular hough transform (CHT),
and the CNN model is trained using the patch method. Zhou et
al. [14] have used a block-based rich model convolution
neural network (rCNN) method for spliced images. The entire
image is cut into blocks and these blocks are fed to an rCNN
model for processing. The rCNN model consists of 7
convolution layers to extract the desired features. The
processed blocks are combined to form a feature vector of the
original image. To solve the prob lem of different sizes of
reconstructed features and loss of informat ion during
reconstruction, resizing and pooling operations are performed.
The feature matrices are then reshaped to a one-dimensional
feature vector which acts as input to the SVM classifier to
classify images as forged or original. This method also proves
its robustness for JPEG compressed images.
V . RESULT S AND D I SCUSSI ON
The major outcomings of our analysis of different research
papers are:-
1. Deep Learning methods perform far better than traditional
methods as they can extract hidden features, thus they give
higher levels of accuracy.
2. These methods are flexible and can be modified a little to
be used for different types of forgery detection.
A summary of review papers on forgery detection using
deep learning techniques is presented in Table 1.
V I. CONCL USION
The paper presented the classification of various types of
image forgery techniques. Tradit ional approaches of forgery
detection use handcrafted features for tampering detection.
Instead, newer approaches based on deep neural networks
(DNN) can outperform t raditional methods due to their ability
to extract co mplex features fro m the image. The paper
discusses basic CNN architecture which is used by most deep
learning approaches. Further, a comparative analysis of various
deep learning methods, their effectiveness, and their
limitat ions are discussed. Some methods classify the image as
original or tampered whereas some methods can detect the
tampered region also. Hence, we conclude that while DNN
approaches have their shortcomings and need further
improvement, but still they can perform better than the
traditional approaches. However, most of the deep learning
approaches detect an only specific types of forgeries. Hence,
in the future, there is a need to build more generalized
algorith ms that can detect various types of forgeries
simultaneously.
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