A survey of passive technology for digital image forensics

Abstract

Over the past years, digital images have been widely used in the Internet and other applications. Whilst image processing techniques are developing at a rapid speed, tampering with digital images without leaving any obvious traces becomes easier and easier. This may give rise to some problems such as image authentication. A new passive technology for image forensics has evolved quickly during the last few years. Unlike the signature-based or watermark-based methods, the new technology does not need any signature generated or watermark embedded in advance. It assumes that different imaging devices or processing would introduce different inherent patterns into the output images. These underlying patterns are consistent in the original untampered images and would be altered after some kind of manipulations. Thus, they can be used as evidence for image source identification and alteration detection. In this paper, we will discuss this new forensics technology and give an overview of the prior literatures. Some concluding remarks are made about the state of the art and the challenges in this novel technology.