Pattern Anal Applic
DOI 10.1007/s10044-016-0588-1
THEORETICAL ADVANCES
Robust copy–move forgery detection using quaternion exponent
moments
Xiang-yang Wang1 • Yu-nan Liu1 • Huan Xu1 • Pei Wang1 • Hong-ying Yang1
Received: 21 December 2015 / Accepted: 20 October 2016
Ó Springer-Verlag London 2016
Abstract The detection of forgeries in color images is a
very important topic in forensic science. Copy–move (or
copy–paste) forgery is the most common form of tamper-
ing associated with color images. Conventional copy–move
forgeries detection techniques usually suffer from the
problems of false positives and susceptibility to many
signal processing operations. It is a challenging work to
design a robust copy–move forgery detection method. In
this paper, we present a novel block-based robust copy–
move forgery detection approach using invariant quater-
nion exponent moments (QEMs). Firstly, original tempered
color image is preprocessed with Gaussian low-pass filter,
and the filtered color image is divided into overlapping
circular blocks. Then, the accurate and robust feature
descriptor, QEMs modulus, is extracted from color image
block holistically as a vector field. Finally, exact Euclidean
locality sensitive hashing is utilized to find rapidly the
matching blocks, and the falsely matched block pairs are
removed by customizing the random sample consensus
with QEMs magnitudes differences. Extensive experi-
mental results show the efficacy of the newly proposed
approach in detecting copy–paste forgeries under various
challenging conditions, such as noise addition, lossy
compression, scaling, and rotation. We obtain the average
forgery detection accuracy (F-measure) in excess of 96 and
& Xiang-yang Wang
wxy37@126.com
& Hong-ying Yang
yhy_65@126.com
1 or increase the number of objects apparently present in the
School of Computer and Information Technology,
Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, Liaoning,
People’s Republic of China
88% across postprocessing operations, at image level and
at pixel level, respectively.
Keywords Digital image forensics  Copy–move forgery
detection  Quaternion exponent moments  E2LSH
1 Introduction
With the development of multimedia technology and
multimedia processing tools, digital image forgery has
been increasingly easy to perform. It has become a severe
threat to security that anyone may access and modify the
content of an image without leaving visually
detectable traces. In recent years, many researchers have
begun to focus on the problem of digital image forgery, and
various methods have been developed to counter tampering
and forgery in order to ensure the authenticity of images.
Current image forgery detection methods can be roughly
categorized as active and passive (blind). Active methods
such as watermarking or illegal image copy detection
depend on prior information about the image. However, in
many situations, prior information regarding an image is
not available and passive, or blind methods should be used
to authenticate the image. The practicality and wide
applicability of passive methods have made them a popular
topic of research [1].
Copy–move (or copy–paste) forgery is one of the most
common types of image forgeries, where a region from one
part of an image is copied and pasted onto another part,
thereby concealing the image content in the latter region.
Such concealment can be used to hide an undesired object
image. Although a simple translation may be sufficient in
many cases, additional operations are often performed in
123

order to better hide the tampering. These include scaling,
rotation, lossy compression, noise addition, blurring,
among others. Because the wide availability of image
processing software has made it easy to perform copy–
move operations, passive copy–move forgery detection
(CMFD) is becoming one of the most important and pop-
ular digital image forensic techniques currently [2, 3]. In
this paper, we focus passive image copy–move forgery
detection. In previous years, many passive forgery detec-
tion approaches have been proposed for copy–move for-
gery detection. According to the existing approaches, the
copy–move forgery detection algorithms can be catego-
rized into two main categories: block-based algorithms and
keypoint-based algorithms. They both try to detect the
copy–move forgery through describing the local patches of
one image.
The block-based forgery detection methods usually
divide the input images into overlapping and regular image
blocks, and then the tampered region can be obtained by
matching blocks of image pixels or transform coefficients.
Because the descriptor of the block is important for the
algorithm, various description methods, like 1D fourier
transform (FT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete
wavelet transform (DWT), singular value decomposition
(SVD), geometric moment, histogram, and principal com-
ponent analysis (PCA), were tested in these papers [4–9].
Although these block-based forgery detection methods are
effective in forgery detection, they have four main draw-
backs: (1) Nearly all of these methods are based on a large
number of blocks and the feature vectors extracted from the
blocks are large, which results in high computational
complexity due to the fact that multiple-index sorting is
required to enable lexicographical sorting of all of the
blocks. In addition, higher computational load for extract-
ing feature vectors is also the weakness of some block-
based forgery detection methods; (2) the host image is
usually divided into overlapping rectangular blocks, which
are fragile to geometrical transformations (e.g., scaling,
rotation). So, the existing methods always cannot address
significant geometrical transformations of the forgery
regions; (3) their recall rate is low under various noises and
geometric transformations, the reason for this is that the
extracted feature description usually cannot stably capture
the image information; and (4) most of the existing copy–
move forgery detections are designed mainly for gray
images in which the significant information correlation
between different color channels is ignored, and they are
often not robust with respect to photometric variations such
as illumination direction, intensity, colors, and highlights.
As an alternative to the block-based methods, keypoint-
based forgery detection methods were proposed. Unlike
block-based algorithms, keypoint-based methods rely on
the identification and selection of high-entropy image
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Pattern Anal Applic
regions (i.e., the ‘‘keypoints’’). A feature vector is then
extracted per keypoint. Consequently, fewer feature vec-
tors are estimated, resulting in reduced computational
complexity of feature matching and postprocessing. The
lower number of feature vectors dictates that postprocess-
ing thresholds are also to be lower than that of block-based
methods. Because the number of the keypoints is much
smaller than that of the blocks divided in an overlapping
way, the keypoint-based algorithms require less computa-
tional resource than the block-based ones. In this regard,
the keypoint-based methods are faster and more favorable
than the block-based ones. However, on the other hand,
keypoint-based method also has the following two prob-
lems. Firstly, the keypoints lying spatially close to each
other should not be compared because they may be natu-
rally similar. The determination of the shortest distance
between two comparable keypoints is tricky. Most prior
arts empirically select this threshold but neglect its rela-
tionship with the image size and content. Secondly, it is
uneasy to accurately localize and distinguish the copying
source region and the pasting target region, because, unlike
the overlapping blocks, the keypoints are often not con-
centrated together [4–9].
Based on invariant quaternion exponent moments
(QEMs), we propose a novel block-based robust copy–
move forgery detection approach in this paper. The novelty
of the proposed approach includes: (1) Image blocks are
represented by QEMs holistically as a vector field. The
accurate and invariant property of QEMs magnitude makes
these moments particularly promising CMFD features; (2)
circular image blocks are adopted instead of rectangular
blocks, which are robust to geometrical transformations
(e.g., scaling, rotation); (3) the E2LSH-based image block
matching is introduced. It can effectively detect the image
block pairs with similar feature vectors; (4) QEMs mag-
nitudes are incorporate into the false matching reduction
procedure, which can effectively remove false positives
and enhance the detection accuracy significantly.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. A review
of previous related work is presented in Sect. 2. Section 3
introduces the quaternion Exponent moments and analyzes
the invariant property of quaternion Exponent moments.
Section 4 contains the description of our copy–move for-
gery detection procedure. Simulation results in Sect. 5 will
show the performance of our scheme. Finally, Sect. 6
concludes this presentation.
2 Related work
Over the past decades, passive copy–move forgery detec-
tion has been an active area of research in many applica-
tions, including: criminalization, surveillance systems,
Pattern Anal Applic

Table 1 Survey of the state-of-the-art passive copy–move forgery detection (CMFD) algorithms
Category Methods Authors

Block-based CMFD algorithms
Keypoint-based CMFD algorithms
Using color-dependent feature vectors and 1-D descriptors Bravo-Solorio et al. [10]
Using Zernike moments of rectangular image blocks Ryu et al. [11]
Using multiresolution local binary patterns Davarzani et al. [12]
Using fast approximate nearest neighbor search Cozzolino et al. [13]
Using approximate 2D-DWT coefficients Fattah et al. [14]
Using Krawtchouk moments Imamoglu et al. [15]
Using histogram of orientated gradients Lee et al. [16]
Using dual tree complex wavelet transform Wu et al. [17]
Using DCT and SVD Jie et al. [18]
Using 1D-Fourier transform Ketenci et al. [19]
Using the histogram of orientated Gabor magnitude Lee et al. [20]
Using undecimated dyadic wavelet transform Muhammad et al. [21]
Using Zernike moments Al-Qershi et al. [22]
Using SIFT features Amerini et al. [23]
Using multi-scale analysis and voting process Silva et al. [24]
Using multiscale Harris operator and MPEG-7 descriptor Kakar et al. [25]
Using local warping algorithms Caldelli et al. [26]
By matching triangles of keypoints Ardizzone et al. [27]
Using distribution of SIFT keypoints Costanzo et al. [28]
Using segmentation and keypoints extraction Li et al. [29]
Using Harris corner detector Chen et al. [30]
Using mirror reflection invariant feature transform (MIFT) features Jaberi et al. [31]
Using MROGH and HH Yu et al. [32]

medical imaging, and news media. Many approaches have
been proposed to solve this problem. They can be roughly
divided into two major categories: block-based algorithms
and keypoint-based algorithms. Table 1 summarizes some
inspiring and pioneering copy–move forgery detection
algorithms.
2.1 Block-based algorithms
These algorithms seek dependence between the image
original area and the pasted one, by dividing the image into
overlapping blocks and then applying a feature extraction
process in order to represent the image blocks through a
low-dimensional representation. Different block-based
representations have been previously proposed in the lit-
erature such as FT, DCT, DWT, SVD, geometric moment,
histogram, and PCA. Bravo-Solorio et al. [10] proposed a
new method to detect duplicated regions, which uses color-
dependent feature vectors to reduce the number of com-
parisons in the search stage, and one-dimensional (1-D)
descriptors to perform an efficient search in terms of
memory usage. Ryu et al. [11] proposed a forensic tech-
nique to localize duplicated image regions based on Zer-
nike moments of small image blocks. The rotation
invariance properties were exploited to reliably unveil
duplicated regions after arbitrary rotations, and a novel
block matching procedure was devised based on locality
sensitive hashing. Davarzani et al. [12] presented an effi-
cient method for copy–move forgery detection using mul-
tiresolution local binary patterns (MLBP). The proposed
method is robust to geometric distortions and illumination
variations of duplicated regions. Furthermore, the proposed
block-based method recovers parameters of the geometric
transformations. Cozzolino et al. [13] proposed a new
algorithm for the accurate detection and localization of
copy–move forgeries, based on rotation-invariant features
computed densely on the image. Here, the PatchMatch
algorithm was used to compute efficiently a high-quality
approximate nearest neighbor field for the whole image.
Fattah et al. [14] developed a copy–move image forgery
detection scheme based on a block matching algorithm.
Instead of considering spatial blocks, 2D-DWT is per-
formed on the forged image and then DWT domain blocks
are considered, where only approximate DWT coefficients
are utilized. Imamoglu et al. [15] used Krawtchouk
moments to extract features of non overlapping image
blocks. For each block, the Krawtchouk moments of order
(n ? m) are calculated to form the feature vector. Then,
blocks’ similarities are tested by inspecting the lexico-
graphically sorted array of features. Lee et al. [16]

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proposed a blind forensics approach to the detection of
copy–move forgery. The input image is segmented into
overlapping blocks, whereupon a histogram of orientated
gradients is applied to each block. Statistical features are
extracted and reduced to facilitate the measurement of
similarity. Finally, feature vectors are lexicographically
sorted, and duplicated image blocks are detected by iden-
tifying similar block pairs after post-processing. Wu et al.
[17] presented a new forensic method to detect the repli-
cated areas rotated by arbitrary angles, even by JPEG
compression. To achieve this, overlapping blocks of pixels
are decomposed using dual tree complex wavelet transform
(DTCWT), and then channel energies are extracted from
each sub-band at each decomposition level using the L1
norm. Finally, the anisotropic rotationally invariant fea-
tures are extracted using magnitudes of discrete Fourier
transform for these channel energies. Jie et al. [18] pro-
posed a robust copy–move forgery detection method based
on DCT and SVD. Firstly, the suspicious image is divided
into fixed-size overlapping blocks and 2D-DCT is applied
to each block, and then the DCT coefficients are quantized
by a quantization matrix to obtain a more robust repre-
sentation of each block. Secondly, each quantized block is
divided nonoverlapping sub-blocks and SVD is applied to
each sub-block, and then features are extracted to reduce
the dimension of each block using its largest singular
value. Finally, the feature vectors are lexicographically
sorted, and duplicated image blocks will be matched by
predefined shift frequency threshold. Ketenci et al. [19]
presented a copy–move forgery detection technique that
uses 1D-Fourier Transform (FT) for feature extraction.
Each block is transformed into frequency domain using
1D-FT over the rows. Average values of FT coefficients
along the columns are calculated to extract the feature
vectors from the blocks. Lee et al. [20] proposed a
scheme for detecting instances of copy–move forgery and
authenticating images based on the Gabor transform. The
image is first divided into overlapping fixed-size blocks.
The histogram of orientated Gabor magnitude (HOGM)
descriptor is then applied to each block for the extraction of
local features. Finally, each feature vector is lexicograph-
ically sorted, and regions of image forgery are detected
through the identification of similar block pairs. Muham-
mad et al. [21] proposed a blind method for copy–move
image forgery detection using undecimated dyadic wave-
lets, in which both the LL1 and HH1 sub-bands are utilized
to find similarities and dissimilarities between the blocks of
an image. Al-Qershi et al. [22] proposed an enhanced
matching method that can be used to detect copy–move
forgery based on Zernike moments. By dividing the blocks
into buckets and adopting relative error instead of Eucli-
dean distance, the proposed method enhanced the detection
accuracy significantly.
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Pattern Anal Applic
2.2 Keypoint-based algorithms
As an alternative to the block-based approaches, keypoint-
based forgery detection algorithms were proposed, where
image keypoints are extracted and matched over the whole
image to resist some image transformations while identi-
fying duplicated regions. Some works have recently
appeared on copy–move forgery detection based on scale-
invariant features transform (SIFT) or Speed up Robust
Feature (SURF) features. Amerini et al. [23] proposed a
novel methodology to support image forensics investiga-
tion based on SIFT features, which are used to robustly
detect and describe clusters of points belonging to cloned
areas. After detection, these points are exploited to recon-
struct the parameters of the geometric transformation. By
using multi-scale analysis and voting processes of a digital
image, Silva et al. [24] proposed a new approach to detect
copy–move forgeries in digital images that is focused
mainly on investigating and spotting out traces of copy–
move forgeries aided by complex operation. Kakar et al.
[25] proposed a copy–move forgery detection technique
using multiscale Harris operator and MPEG-7 image sig-
nature tools. They also used a feature matching process that
utilizes the inherent constraints in matched feature pairs to
improve the detection of cloned regions. Caldelli et al. [26]
investigated the effectiveness of some methodologies
which introduce a local warping onto the copy–pasted
patches in order to reduce the detection capability of SIFT-
based approaches. They compared four different local
warping algorithms in terms of removed matches after the
attack and visual quality of the attacked patches. Ardizzone
et al. [27] presented a very novel hybrid approach, which
compares triangles rather than blocks, or single points.
Interest points are extracted from the image and objects are
modeled as a set of connected triangles built onto these
points. Triangles are matched according to their shapes
(inner angles), their content (color information), and the
local feature vectors extracted onto the vertices of the tri-
angles. Costanzo et al. [28] proposed three novel forensic
detectors for the identification of images whose SIFT
keypoints have been artificially removed and possibly
reinserted. The proposed algorithms scan image regions
with sufficiently high variance in search of suspect incon-
sistencies in the number and in the distribution of SIFT
keypoints. By relying on such algorithms, the forensic
analyst can decide on the authenticity of the image as a
whole or localize tampered regions within the image by
means of a sliding window approach. Li et al. [29] pro-
posed a scheme to detect the copy–move forgery in an
image, mainly by extracting the keypoints for comparison.
The main difference to the traditional methods is that the
proposed scheme first segments the test image into
semantically independent patches prior to keypoint
Pattern Anal Applic

extraction. As a result, the copy–move regions can be
detected by matching between these patches. Chen et al.
[30] proposed an effective method to detect region dupli-
cation based on the image interest points detected through
the Harris corner detector. After the interest points are
obtained, a rotation-robust image region description
method based on step sector statistics is proposed to give a
unique representation for each small circle region around
the interest points. Then the matching of the representa-
tions of the interest points will reveal the duplicate regions
in the forged digital images. Jaberi et al. [31] adopted
keypoint-based features for copy–move image forgery
detection, which employing a new set of keypoint-based
features, called MIFT, for finding similar regions in an
image. To estimate the affine transformation between
similar regions more accurately, an iterative scheme was
proposed which refines the affine transformation parameter
by finding more keypoint matches incrementally. Yu et al.
[32] proposed two-stage feature detection to obtain better
feature coverage and enhance the matching performance by
combining the multi-support region order-based gradient
histogram (MROGH) and hue histogram (HH) descriptor.
3 Introduction to quaternion exponent moments
where a, b, c, and d are real numbers, and i; j and k are
three imaginary units.
Using this representation, a color image f ðx; yÞ, sized by
M  N, can be considered as an array of pure quaternion
numbers (e.g., with no real parts)
f ðx; yÞ ¼ fR ðx; yÞi þ fG ðx; yÞj þ fB ðx; yÞk
where fR ðx; yÞ, fG ðx; yÞ, and fB ðx; yÞ represent, respectively,
the classical red, green, and blue components. Obviously,
by using the quaternion-type representation, a color image
can be treated as a vector field and be processed directly,
without losing color information.
Let f ðr; hÞ be a RGB color image defined in polar
coordinates, the quaternion Exponent moments (QEMs)
[34] of order n with repetition m (n and m in (1) are gen-
erally called order and repetition, respectively),
jnj ¼ jmj ¼ 0; 1. . .; 1, is defined as
Z Z
1 2p 1
En;m ¼ f ðr; hÞAn ðr Þ expðlmhÞrdrdh ð1Þ
4p 0 0
where l is a unit pure quaternion chosen as
pffiffiffi
l ¼ ði þ j þ kÞ= 3, and An ðrÞ is the conjugate of radial
basis function An ðrÞ given by
qffiffiffiffiffiffi
An ðrÞ ¼ 2=r expðj2nprÞ; m ¼ 1; . . .; 0; . . .; þ1

In 2011, Jiang et al. [33] extended radial harmonic Fourier Since the radial Exponent basis functions are orthogo-
moments and introduced a new moment named Exponent nal, the color image f ðr; hÞ can be reconstructed approxi-
moments (EMs) according to the relation between the mately from a limited orders of QEMs (n  nmax ,
exponential function and triangular function. Compared m  mmax ). The more orders used, the more accurate the
with other orthogonal moment, EMs has a better image color image description
reconstruction, lower noise sensitivity, and lower compu- þ1 X
X þ1
0
tational complexity, especially for small images. Besides, f ðr; hÞ ¼ En;m An ðrÞ expðlmhÞ
EMs is free of numerical instability issues so that high- n¼1 m¼1
order moments can be obtained accurately. Generally, by X
þn max X
þm max

 En;m An ðr Þ expðlmhÞ ð2Þ

using the quaternion-type representation, a color image can
be treated as a vector field and be processed directly,
without losing color information. In 2014, Wang et al. [34]
extended the excellent EMs defined in gray-scale image to
color image using the algebra of quaternion and proposed
the quaternion Exponent moments (QEMs) for describing
color images. Experimental results show that the QEMs
modulus has good robustness against various noises, geo-
metric transformations, and color variations. So, the EQMs
modulus is suitable for descripting color image content,
especially for small image blocks.
A quaternion is regarded as a four-parameter represen-
tation of a coordinate transformation matrix, where the four
components of the quaternion are treated on an equal basis.
A quaternion consists of one real part and three imaginary
parts as follows
q ¼ a þ bi þ cj þ dk
n¼nmax m¼mmax
0
where f ðr; hÞ is the reconstructed color image. The basis
functions An ðrÞ expðlmhÞ of the QEMs are orthogonal over
the interior of the unit circle, and each order of the QEMs
makes an independent contribution to the reconstruction of
the color image.
Below, we will derive and analyze the geometric
invariant property of QEMs. Let f r ðr; hÞ ¼ f ðr; h þ aÞ
denote the rotation change of a color image f ðr; hÞ by the
angle a, then QEMs of f ðr; h þ aÞ and f ðr; hÞ have the
following relations
En;m ðf r Þ ¼ En;m ð f Þ expðlmaÞ ð3Þ
where En;m ðf r Þ and En;m ðf Þ are the QEMs of f r ðr; hÞ and
f ðr; hÞ, respectively. According to Eq. (3), we know that a
rotation of the color image by an angle a induces a phase

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 Pattern Anal Applic

shift elma of the En;m ðf Þ. Taking the norm on both sides of 4.1 Gaussian low-pass filter preprocessing
Eq. (3), we have
      Gaussian filtering is a common denoising technique often
En;m ðf r Þ ¼ En;m ð f Þ expðlmaÞ ¼ En;m ð f ÞjexpðlmaÞj
  used in image processing, and it can help to improve the
¼ En;m ð f Þ
detection result when there are some post-processing
So, the rotation invariance can be achieved by taking the operation such as JPEG compression and noise contami-
norm of the color images’ QEMs. In other words, the nation [35]. The reason is that the features extracted from
QEMs modulus jEn;m ðf Þj is invariant with respect to rota- the Gaussian filtered image are more robust against those
tion transform. Besides, the QEMs modulus is invariant to operations. Thus, we first preprocess the tempered color
scaling if the computation area can be made to cover the image I by a 2-D Gaussian low-pass filter
same content. In practice, this condition is met because the 1 x2 þy2 2
QEMs are defined on the unit disk. Fðx; y; rÞ ¼ e 2r ð4Þ
2pr2
Some examples of the reconstructed image Lena are
where ðx; yÞ denotes the position of the pixel and r is the
shown in Fig. 1. As more moments are added to the
standard deviation of the distribution, which is usually
reconstruction process, the reconstructed images get closer
chosen as r = 1. The Gaussian filtered image Ilow can be
to the original images. As can be observed from the
expressed as
reconstructed images, QEMs capture the color image
information, especially the edges. Ilow ðx; yÞ ¼ Fðx; y; rÞ  Iðx; yÞ ð5Þ
Figure 2 shows the QEMs modulus distribution for color
where * denotes the convolution operator. If Ihigh stands for
image Lena under various attacks. It can be seen that the
the high-frequency component removed by the Gaussian
QEMs modulus has good robustness against various noises,
filtering from the tempered color image I, it follows
geometric transformations, and color variations.
Ihigh ðx; yÞ ¼ Iðx; yÞ  Ilow ðx; yÞ ð6Þ
In practice, the size of the Gaussian mask F is often
4 The proposed robust copy–move forgery
chosen using expression ð2kr þ 1Þð2kr þ 1Þ, where k is a
detection
positive integer. In this paper, we set k to be 3, thus the size
of the Gaussian mask F is 7 9 7.
The proposed framework for robust copy–move forgery
detection shown in Fig. 3 is carried out in five steps
4.2 Dividing the filtered color image
here. First, Gaussian low-pass filter preprocessing is
into overlapping circular blocks
applied to the original tempered color image to reduce
noise impact. Second, the filtered color image is divided
To identify forged regions, the Gaussian filtered image
into overlapping circular blocks, which are robust to
should be firstly divided into numbers of overlapped
geometrical transformations (e.g., scaling, rotation).
blocks, and then the similarity between every two image
Third, the accurate feature descriptor, QEMs modulus, is
blocks is computed. But for the existing CMFD approa-
extracted from color image block holistically as a vector
ches, the image is usually divided into overlapping rect-
field, which can achieve good robustness against various
angular blocks, which are fragile to some geometrical
noises, geometric transformations, and color variations.
transformations such as rotation. So, these methods always
Fourth, the exact Euclidean LSH (E2LSH), a scheme of
cannot address significant geometrical transformations of
locality sensitive hashing (LSH) realized in Euclidean
the forgery regions.
space, is adopted to find rapidly the matching image
In this paper, we divide the Gaussian filtered image into
blocks. Finally, the random sample consensus (RAN-
overlapping circular blocks. The circular image blocks
SAC) algorithm is utilized to remove the false positives
slide along the Gaussian filtered image for feature extrac-
from the set of potential copy–move image blocks. The
tion, from upper left to bottom right, with a displacement of
following sections provide detailed steps in this proposed
one pixel in horizontal or vertical directions at each time.
framework.

Fig. 1 Reconstructed images for color image Lena of size 128 9 128 (moment orders K = 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50)

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Pattern Anal Applic
Fig. 2 QEMs modulus for color image Lena under various noises, geometric transformations, and color variations: a original image, b Gaussian
filtering, c salt and pepper noise, d JPEG 50, e blurring, f contrast changing, g rotation (45°), h scaling (0.8), i affine translation
Tempered
color
image
Gaussian filter Color image
preprocessing blocking
Fig. 3 Proposed framework for robust copy–move forgery detection
Given an M 9 N color image under analysis, we denote
overlapping circular blocks with radius R as Bi;j , where
subscript ði; jÞ 2 fR; R þ 1; . . .; M  Rg  fR; R þ 1; . . .;
N  Rg refers to row and column index of a circular
block’s center in the intensity plane, respectively. So, the
number of the overlapping circular image blocks is
ðM  2R þ 1Þ  ðN  2R þ 1Þ.
4.3 Image block feature extraction
Feature extraction is a prerequisite step for CMFD and
crucial to detection accuracy. It is desired that the blocks in
a copy–move pair can be mapped to similar features even
in the presence of post-processing. At the same time, the
features should correctly distinguish distinct blocks in the
Detection
results
Block feature Block pairs Detection results
extraction matching post-processing
image, even under some severe conditions. However, most
of the existing CMFD algorithms are designed mainly for
gray images in which the significant information correla-
tion between different color channels is ignored, and they
are often not robust with respect to photometric variations
such as illumination direction, intensity, colors, and
highlights.
From the foregoing, we know that QEMs can effec-
tively capture the color image contents holistically as a
vector field, and QEMs modulus has good robustness
against various noises, geometric transformations, and
color variations, especially for small image blocks. So,
the QEMs modulus is employed to extract features from
the circular image blocks in this paper, and the feature
vector Eði;jÞ of each circular block Bi;j is composed of the
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Table 2 List of the selected QEMs features for different max orders
Order Moments
1 jE1;1 j
2 jE2;2 j; jE2;1 j; jE2;0 j
3 jE3;3 j; jE3;2 j; jE3;1 j; jE3;0 j
4 jE4;4 j; jE4;3 j; jE4;2 j; jE4;1 j; jE4;0 j
8 jE8;8 j; jE8;7 j; jE8;6 j; jE8;5 j; jE8;4 j; jE8;3 j; jE8;2 j; jE8;1 j; jE8;0 j
9 jE9;9 j; jE9;8 j; jE9;7 j; jE9;6 j; jE9;5 j; jE9;4 j; jE9;3 j; jE9;2 j; jE9;1 j; jE9;0 j
QEMs modulus computed with different values of n and
m, as
        
 ði;jÞ   ði;jÞ   ði;jÞ   ði;jÞ  
Eði;jÞ ¼ E0;0 ; E1;0 ; E1;1 ; . . .; Enmax ;mmax 1 ; Enði;jÞ
max ;mmax
Here, the selected QEMs modulus conveys different
visual information of the circular block. Those with small
values of n and m capture the coarse skeleton of the circular
block, and the others characterize its visual details. In this
manner, the feature vector can provide a rich representation
of the circular block, which can effectively reduce the rate
of false detections.
However, we do not need all the QEMs modulus in
color image block pairs matching. The choice of the max
order value nmax will depend on the size of the given color
image and also on the resolution needed. The number of
QEMs modulus required, however, does not need to be
large, since color image features can normally be captured
by just a few low-frequency modulus. Further, the QEMs
modulus jEn;m j ¼ jEn;m j and the values of jE0;0 j and jE1;0 j
are nearly constant for all normalized images, so only
jEn;m j (n  1; m  0) is selected as the color image block
feature in this paper. Table 2 lists the selected QEMs
features for different max orders. From the reconstruction
process presented in Sect. 3 (see Fig. 1), we can see that
QEMs, with the max order up to twenty, could have a
sufficiently good color image representation power.
4.4 Image block pairs matching
After image block feature extraction, the CMFD algorithm
will identify a number of potential copy–move pairs by
searching the image blocks with similar feature vectors,
and these potential image block pairs will consequently
undergo further verifications. We know, with the explosive
data growth, fast similarity indexing and search are always
considered to be one of the most fundamental problems for
the multimedia communities. This problem is also known
as nearest neighbor (NN) search, which is defined as
accurately finding the close samples for a given query
within a large data set. It is of great importance to a wide
123
Pattern Anal Applic
No. of moments Accumulative no.
1 1
3 4
4 8
5 13
9 43
10 53
range of multimedia applications, such as content-based
image retrieval, image classification, and scene recogni-
T tion. To identify duplicated block pairs with the same or

 similar block features is a key step in copy–move forgery
ð7Þ detection, and exhaustive searching and lexicographic
sorting strategies have been utilized in most of the existing
block-based CMFD methods in recent years. The exhaus-
tive searching and lexicographic sorting for the neighbors
according to their similarities entails exhaustively com-
paring the queries with the blocks over the entire image.
These strategies have linear complexity with respect to the
scale of the image blocks, which is infeasible on ever larger
image. Besides, to achieve satisfying performance on such
images, most of the related CMFD methods have to rely on
the high-dimensional or structured image block represen-
tations, as well as the computationally considerable dis-
tance functions. Therefore, the exhaustive searching and
lexicographic sorting strategies are prohibitively expensive
in practical situations.
In order to match image blocks and accurately identify
regions that are likely to have been forged, the corre-
sponding image blocks should be identified by estimating
the Euclidean distances of the feature vectors
 ði;jÞ 
E  Eðk;lÞ   D1
where D1 is feature Euclidean distance threshold. In this
paper, we improve the structure of image block pairs
matching algorithm and propose an enhanced model based
on the exact Euclidean locality sensitive hashing (E2LSH)
[36], which has been widely used in large scale video/
image similarity search and rapid retrieval applications.
E2LSH is a scheme of LSH realized in Euclidean space.
The key idea of LSH is to hash the points using several
hash functions so as to ensure that for each function, the
probability of collision is much higher for objects which
are close to each other than for those which are far apart.
Here, collision refers to locating the same hash
h(x) = h(x0 ) with two different inputs x and x0 .
According to the choice of hash function h, LSH has
many different formats, among which E2LSH is a repre-
sentative scheme. The LSH function family that E2LSH
Pattern Anal Applic
employed is based on p-stable distributions, and the fol-
lowing LSH functions was employed in this paper,
 
aEþb
ha;b ðEÞ ¼ ð8Þ
x
where bc is the floor operation, a is a d-dimensional vector
with components that are selected at random from a p-
stable distribution, b is a random variable uniformly dis-
tributed in [0, x], E is the feature vectors, and x is a
constant. The hash function ha;b ðEÞ maps a d-dimensional
vector E into the integer set.
In practical application, E2LSH usually combines k
LSH functions, and a function set is defined as
n ¼ fg : S ! U k g
where gðEÞ ¼ ðh1 ðEÞ; . . .; hk ðEÞÞ, for each E 2 Rd , k
dimensional vector E ¼ ða1 ; a2 ; . . .; ak Þ is obtained after
the mapping of gðEÞ 2 n. Then a primary hash function
hash1 and secondary hash function hash2 are utilized to
hash the vector a ¼ ða1 ; a2 ; . . .; ak Þ, constructing the hash
tables and saving the data points. hash1 and hash2 are
defined as follows
! !
Xk
0
hash1 ðaÞ ¼ ri ai mod m mod s
i¼1
! ð9Þ
X
k SAC is a popular choice for a variety of robust estimation
00
hash2 ðaÞ ¼ r i ai mod m
i¼1
0 00
where ri and ri are random integers, s is the size of hash
tables, and m is a prime number. E2LSH puts data points
having the same hash1 and hash2 value into the same
bucket in a hash table, thus realizing data points’ partition.
After the above E2LSH hash table building procedure
are repeated Q times with the QEMs feature vector Eði;jÞ to
further increase the clustering accuracy for near-duplicate
vectors, we can construct the overall Q hash tables,
whereas each feature vector is stored in corresponding
buckets g0 ðEði;jÞ Þ; g1 ðEði;jÞ Þ; . . .; gQ1 ðEði;jÞ Þ. Once the hash
tables are generated, finding a near-duplicate image block
for a query EðqueryÞ Eði;jÞ means inspecting all buckets
g0 ðEðqueryÞ Þ; g1 ðEðqueryÞ Þ; . . .; gQ1 ðEðqueryÞ Þ for a feature
vector EðmatchÞ Eðk;lÞ . As image blocks in close spatial
proximity are likely to yield relatively similar QEMs
modulus, we further evaluate the spatial distance between
image blocks in the intensity plane and require
kði; jÞ  ðk; lÞk  D2 ð10Þ
pffiffiffi
where the spatial distance threshold D2 ¼ 2 2R, R is the
image blocks radius.
Among candidate image blocks satisfying (10), the pair
with minimum distance in the feature space is selected and
considered as potentially being part of a duplicated region.
4.5 Postprocessing to reduce false matching
Although the aforementioned E2LSH-based image block
pairs matching can effectively detect the pairs with similar
feature vectors, false matching occurs when pairs of orig-
inal image blocks have similar QEMs magnitudes despite
not being duplicated. To remove such false positives from
the set of potential copy–move image blocks, we can
estimate the affine transformation parameters by cus-
tomizing the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC)
algorithm with QEMs magnitudes differences. These affine
transformation parameters always have a high degree of
accuracy even when a significant number of errors are
present and can be used to verify whether two regions
correspond by mapping one region to the other.
RANSAC algorithm was first introduced by Fischler and
Bolles [37], which is a simple, yet powerful parameter
estimation approach designed to cope with a large pro-
portion of outliers in the input data. In essence, RANSAC
is a resampling technique that generates candidate solu-
tions using the minimum number data points required to
estimate the underlying model parameters. This algorithm
estimates a global relation that fits the data, while simul-
taneously classifying the data into inliers and outliers. Due
to its ability to tolerate a large fraction of outliers, RAN-
problems.
Denoting the set of all E2LSH-matched image block
pairs as P, a reduced set P is constructed from P by
keeping only those pairings for which at least one spatially
adjacent image block pair is also included in P. Assuming
that the block size is smaller than the duplicated region, the
rationale is that spatial neighbors of a duplicated block are
with high probability part of the same duplicated region.
Then, the RANSAC algorithm is applied to the reduced set
P . Denoting a pair of matched image blocks as
ðEði;jÞ ; Eðk;lÞ Þ, we select three spatially adjacent collinear
pairs from P to infer their 2  2 affine transformation R in
the spatial domain,
ði; jÞT ¼ R  ðk; lÞT þ t
sx 0 cos u  sin u t
R¼  ; t¼ x
0 sy sin u cos u ty
tx sx 0 cos u  sin u
where , ; and are shift
ty 0 sy sin u cos u
vector, scaling matrix and rotation matrix, respectively.
All image pairs in P are classified into inliers or outliers
by checking the condition
jjði; jÞT ¼ R  ðk; lÞT þ tjj\T
for classification threshold T. This procedure is repeated
Niter times, each time initialized with a triple of block pairs
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Table 3 Categorization of Christlein’s dataset by texture properties
Category Assigned images
Small copied area
Smooth Ship, motorcycle, sailing, disconnected shift, noise pattern, berries,
sails, mask, cattle, swan, Japan tower, wading
Rough Supermarket, no beach, fisherman, barrier, three hundred, writing
history, central park
Structured Bricks, statue, giraffe, dark and bright, sweets, Mykene, jellyfish chaos,
Egyptian, window, knight moves
randomly drawn from set P . The algorithm outputs the set
of pairings with the largest number of inliers as duplicated
region. In this paper, the RANSAC parameters are set to
classification threshold T = 2 and iteration times
Niter = 100, which resemble literature settings [37].
After postprocessing to reduce false matching, we can
construct a duplication map to visualize the forgery
detection result. We firstly create an all-zeros matrix M that
has the same size as the tempered image and set the entry
Mi,j to one if the coordinate (i, j) in the image is covered by
a copy–move pair. Then, we use a forged area threshold A,
a value denoting the minimum area of the duplicated
region, to remove small isolated regions. Finally, we use
mathematical morphological operations to smooth and
connect the boundaries of the detected duplicated regions,
and the duplication map can be obtained by multiplying the
binary matrix with the tempered image.
5 Simulation results
In this section, we present the experimental results of the
proposed copy–move forgery detection approach. We
firstly discuss the various parameter values used in our
CFMD approach. We then present the quantitative results
and examples for the detection of copy–move forgeries
subjected to many image processing operations. Also,
experimental results are compared with methods in
[9, 11, 13]. All measurements are performed on a desktop
computer with Dual Core 3.4-GHz Pentium CPU and 4 GB
RAM memory, running MATLAB R2010b.
5.1 Test image dataset and error measures
In this paper, the public available image dataset is utilized
to evaluate the performance of different CMFD schemes,
which was constructed by Christlein et al. [2]. The image
dataset is composed of 48 high-resolution uncompressed
color images. In this dataset, the copied image regions are
from the categories of nature, living, man-made, and
mixed, and they range from overly highly textured to
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Pattern Anal Applic
Large copied area
Four babies, Scotland, hedge, tapestry, Malawi
Lone cat, kore, white, clean walls, tree, christmash edge,
stone ghost, beach wood, red tower
Fountain, horses, port, wood carvings, extension
smooth; the copy–move forgeries are created by copying,
rotating, and scaling semantically meaningful image
regions. Table 3 shows the assignment of images to cate-
gories. In summary, the dataset has 1826 color images in
total, which are realistic copy–move forgeries.
In this work, we evaluate the CMFD performance at
two levels: at pixel level, where we focus on how
accurately can the tampered image regions be identified;
at image level, where we evaluate whether the fact that
an image has been tampered or not can be detected. At
image level, we computed the error measures Precision
and Recall as
TP TP
Precision ¼ ; and Recall ¼
TP þ FP TP þ FN
where Precision denotes the probability that a detected
forgery is truly a forgery, while Recall shows the proba-
bility that a forged image is detected. TP denotes the
number of correctly detected forged images, FP denotes the
number of images that have been erroneously detected as
forged, and FN denotes the falsely missed forged images.
We also compute another criterion F as a measure which
combines Precision and Recall in a single value.
Precision  Recall
F ¼2
Precision þ Recall
We also used these measures at pixel level. In that case,
TP denotes the number of correctly detected forged pixels.
FP is the number of falsely detected forged pixels, and FN
denotes the falsely missed pixels. The previous definition
of Precision, Recall and F measures also hold on the pixel
level.
In this paper, we evaluate the proposed CMFD approach
at the image level and pixel level simultaneously. This is
because that the pixel-level decisions are useful for
assessing the general localization performance of the
approach when the ground-truth data are available and the
image-level metrics are especially interesting with respect
to the automated detection of manipulated color images. In
general, a higher recall, a higher precision, and a higher F-
measure indicate superior performance.
Pattern Anal Applic

Fig. 4 Average error measures

at pixel level for different image
blocks radius

5.2 Selection of parameter values Table 4 Average CMFD performance for different values of feature
Euclidean distance at pixel level in percent
The selection of parameter values is a key component of D1 Precision Recall F
the CMFD approaches. The parameter values that we use in
50 95.21 68.37 79.58
our approach are presented in this section. These values are
100 93.89 75.58 83.74
mostly determined empirically, and the reasons for their
150 92.84 79.23 85.50
usage are explained as follows.
200 92.10 86.34 89.12
There are three parameters to be investigated: image
250 91.64 91.08 91.35
blocks radius R, feature Euclidean distance D1, and forged
300 91.08 93.25 92.15
area A. We empirically determine appropriate parameter
400 90.32 93.95 92.06
values, and several values of each parameter will be tested
500 87.62 94.14 90.76
to see their effect on the identification of the non-forged
and forged images. From the above public available image 600 84.06 94.55 88.96
dataset, we selected randomly 20 color images and created 700 79.43 94.60 86.35
100 CMFD benchmark images with common image pro- 800 70.98 95.25 81.34
cessing (additive Gaussian noise, JPEG compression, and 900 65.02 95.72 77.43
blur degradation, etc.). Thus, we evaluated on the 100 1000 60.51 95.81 74.17
tampered images. Bold and underlined values indicate the optimal feature Euclidean
distance and optimal Forged area
5.2.1 Image blocks radius R
forgery detection performance is measured by average
Precision, average Recall, and average F. Obviously, the
Since we use the overlapping circular image blocks and
comparison results indicate that the proposed CMFD
QEMs modulus method for extracting the matching fea-
algorithm can achieve much better forgery detection results
tures, selecting the radius of the circular image block is
when the feature Euclidean distance D1 is set to 300.
usually a tricky thing. Here, we use different image blocks
radius ranging from 6 to 26 with 2 increment and compute
5.2.3 Forged area A
the corresponding average error measures Precision and
Recall. As can be seen from Fig. 4, with the increase of the
We estimated forged area A by optimizing the F-measure
image block radius, the Precision is prone to decrease on
at image level. Table 5 shows the average CMFD perfor-
the whole, but the Recall is prone to increase on the whole.
mance of 100 tampered images for the different values of
Therefore, in order to make the balance between Precision
forged area. It can be seen that our method performs sig-
and Recall performance, we set the image block radius
nificantly better when the forged area A is set to 700.
R = 9.
5.3 Detection results at pixel level
5.2.2 Feature Euclidean distance D1
In this experiment, we evaluate how precisely the copy–
Table 4 shows the comparison results for our forgery moved regions can be marked. So, we focused mainly on
detection with different feature Euclidean distance. Here, the number of detected (or missed) copied-moved matches.

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 Pattern Anal Applic

Table 5 Average CMFD performance for different values of forged parametrized via the noise’s standard deviation and the
area at image level in percent filter’s radius. Here, we considered zero-mean AWGN
A Precision Recall F with standard deviation 2, 4, 6, and 8, as well as
average filters of radius 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5,
50 95.86 60.34 74.06 respectively.
100 95.27 63.85 76.45 4. Rotation One important question that recently gained
200 94.67 67.79 79.01 much attention was the resilience of CMFD
300 94.23 75.32 83.72 approaches to affine transformations, like rotation
400 93.97 80.12 84.50 and scaling. We rotated the copied regions with the
500 93.31 85.78 89.38 rotation angle varying from 2° to 10°, in increments of
600 92.90 92.08 92.48 2°, and with the rotation angles of 20°, 60°, and 180°
700 92.45 93.67 93.06 as well. In this case, we tested a total of 48 9 8 = 384
800 90.65 93.87 91.14 forgeries images.
900 86.55 94.03 90.13 5. Scaling We also conducted an experiment where the
1000 82.91 94.68 88.40 copied match was slightly rescaled, as is often the case
1100 73.34 95.12 82.82 in real-world image manipulations. Specifically, we
1200 65.13 95.77 77.53 rescaled the copied region between 91 and 109% of its
Bold and underlined values indicate the optimal feature Euclidean original size, in steps of 2%. We also evaluated
distance and optimal Forged area rescaling by 50, 70, 110, and 200% to test the
degradation of approaches under larger amounts of
For each detected image match, we check the centers of
copied region resizing.
two matched image blocks against the corresponding
(pixelwise) ground-truth image. All boundary pixels are Figures 5 and 6 show the detection results on some test
excluded from the evaluation. Please note that all the color images from Christlein’s dataset [2] with copy–move
measures, e.g., false positives and false negatives, are regions fused in the background. It can easily be observed
computed using all the pixels in the tampered images only. that the proposed approach detects most copy–move
In the practical test, we first evaluate the proposed regions. Figure 7 shows the average CMFD performance at
approach under ideal conditions (no postprocessing) of the pixel level under various attacks on the copied region,
pixels. Subsequent experiments examine the cases of: including common signal processing and geometric
JPEG compression on the copied region, noise on the distortions.
copied region, rotation and scaling of the copied region. Table 6 shows the average F-measure and average AUC
under ideal conditions (no postprocessing) for the proposed
1. Plain copy–move We firstly evaluated how the CMFD
approach compared with the existing CMFD methods. This
approaches perform under ideal conditions (no post-
table indicates that the forgery detection result of the
processing). Here, we used the 48 forgery color images
proposed approach is better than that of the existing state-
from Christlein’s dataset without any additional mod-
of-the-art CMFD methods when under plain copy–move.
ification to evaluate the detection performance. Note
that we calibrated the thresholds for all approaches in a
way that yields very competitive (comparable) detec- 5.4 Detection results at image level
tion performances.
2. JPEG compression We introduced a common local Area-based pixel-level performance measures such as
disturbance on the copied regions, lossy JPEG com- Precision, Recall, and F rates are useful when we know that
pression, for which the quality factors varied between the tested color images are forgeries. Yet, in practice, they
30 and 90 in steps of 10. For each evaluated quality are usually not known a priori. In the next section, we test
level, we applied the same JPEG compression to the the overall image-level detection performance of our
copied regions of the 48 forgeries images, so a total of approach. Specifically, for a forgery color image, a suc-
48 9 8 = 384 forgeries images are tested. For very cessful detection is deemed when our approach detects a
low quality factors, the visual quality of the color duplicated region larger than the area threshold. For an
image is strongly affected. But, we consider at least untampered color image, a true negative occurs when our
quality levels down to 70 as reasonable assumptions approach does not detect any duplicated region.
for real-world image forgeries. We split these image-level experiments in a series of
3. Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) We applied separate evaluations. We firstly evaluate the proposed
additive white Gaussian noise to the copied regions of approach under ideal conditions (plain copy–move). Here,
the 48 forgeries images. The strength of distortion is we have 48 original color images and 48 forgery color

123
Pattern Anal Applic

Fig. 5 Detection results on some test images from Christlein’s dataset [2]: a original images, b tempered images, c ground-truth forgery regions,
d detected forgery regions using Ryu’s method [11], e detected forgery regions using our approach

images, in which a one-to-one copy–move is implemented.
We must distinguish the original and forgery color images
in this case. Then, our copy–move forgery approach is
evaluated under different types of attacks, including the
geometric transforms such as rotation and scaling, and
common signal processing such as JPEG compression and
additive white Gaussian noise.
Figure 8 shows the average CMFD performance at
image level on some test images from Christlein’s dataset
[2] under various attacks.
1. Plain copy–move We firstly evaluated the proposed
approach under ideal conditions. Here, 48 original
color images and 48 forgery color images are used, and
per-method optimal thresholds are chosen for classi-
fying these 96 images. Similarly to the experiment at
pixel level, all regions have been copied and pasted
without additional disturbances.
2. JPEG compression We used the same experimental
setup as in the pixel-level evaluation, i.e., added JPEG

123
 Pattern Anal Applic

Fig. 6 Detection results on some test images from Christlein’s dataset [2]: a original images, b tempered images, c ground-truth forgery regions,
d detected forgery regions using Ryu’s method [11], e detected forgery regions using our approach

compression between quality levels 30 and 100 in steps
of 10.
3. Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) We again used
the same experimental setup as in the pixel-level
evaluation, i.e., zero-mean AWGN with standard
deviation 2, 4, 6, and 8, as well as average filters of
radius 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5, has been inserted snippets
before splicing.
4. Rotation We evaluated cases where the copied matches
have been rotated between 2° and 10° in steps of 2° and
also tested three larger rotation angles of 20°, 60°, and
180°. We assumed them to be the reasonable ranges.
5. Scaling The experimental setup is the same as on the
pixel-level analysis. The copied regions are scaled
between 91 and 109% of their original size in steps of
2%. Additionally, more extreme scaling parameters
were evaluated, including 50, 80, 120, and 200%.
From the above experimental results, we can see that the
newly proposed approach can achieve much better

123
Pattern Anal Applic

Fig. 7 Average CMFD performance (F-measure) at pixel level on some test images from Christlein’s dataset [2]: a JPEG compression,
b additive white Gaussian noise, c rotation, d scaling

Table 6 Average detection results under plain copy–move at pixel blocks, which are robust to geometrical transformations
level and image level (e.g., scaling, rotation); (3) the E2LSH based image block
Methods Average F-measure Average AUC matching is introduced. It can effectively detect the image
block pairs with similar feature vectors; (4) QEMs mag-
Image level Pixel level
nitudes are incorporate into the false matching reduction
Pun [9] 0.9611 0.7973 0.8975 procedure, which can effectively remove false positives
Ryu [11] 0.9494 0.7586 0.8723 and enhance the detection accuracy significantly.
Cozzolino [13] 0.9470 0.8740 0.8710 Despite the present advances, there is still much room
Our scheme 0.9696 0.8826 0.9268 for improvements. As an example, the proposed copy–
move forgery approach is computationally more
demanding, which makes the proposed approach cannot
detection results for copy–move forgery color images
be used effectively in real-time applications.
under various challenging conditions, such as JPEG com-
pression, geometric transforms, and additive white Gaus-
sian noise, compared with the state-of-the-art CMFD
schemes. This is because that (1) image blocks are repre- 6 Conclusion
sented by QEMs holistically as a vector field. The accurate
and invariant property of QEMs magnitude makes these Copy–move forgeries are a common type of forgery where
moments particularly promising CMFD features; (2) cir- parts of an image are replaced with other parts from the
cular image blocks are adopted instead of rectangular same image. The copied and pasted regions may be sub-

123

Fig. 8 Average CMFD performance (F-measure) at image level on some test images from Christlein’s dataset [2]: a JPEG compression,
b additive white Gaussian noise, c rotation, d scaling
jected to various image transformations in order to conceal
the tampering better. Conventional techniques of detecting
copy–paste forgeries usually suffer from the problems of
false positives and susceptibility to many image processing
operations. In this work, we describe a new copy–move
forgery detection method, which is based on circular image
blocks and invariant QEMs feature descriptor. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach
with a large number of experiments. Experimental results
show that the proposed approach can achieve better
detection results for copy–move forgery images if the
forged image is rotated, scaled or highly compressed. We
compared the robustness of our method with the previously
proposed scheme which use Zernike moments as features,
and we showed that our method is more robust to various
types of processing.
The limitation of the proposed copy–move forgery
detection is that it has higher computational complexity,
which makes the proposed approach cannot be used
effectively in real-time applications. In our future work, we
will focus on eliminating these drawbacks by utilizing
123
Pattern Anal Applic
superpixel theory. Also, we will investigate the use of our
approach in detecting regions which have undergone non-
affine transformations and/or are multiply copied.
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