Detection for Operation Chain: Histogram Equalization and Dither-like Operation

Many sorts of image processing software facilitate image editing and also generate a great number of doctored images. Forensic technology emerges to detect the unintentional or malicious image operations. Most of forensic methods focus on the detection of single operations. However, a series of operations may be used to sequentially manipulate an image, which makes the operation detection problem complex. Forensic investigators always want to know as much exhaustive information about a suspicious image’s entire processing history as possible. The detection of the operation chain, consisting of a series of operations, is a significant and challenging problem in the research field of forensics. In this paper, based on the histogram distribution uniformity of a manipulated image, we propose an operation chain detection scheme to identify histogram equalization (HE) followed by the dither-like operation (DLO). Two histogram features and a local spatial feature are utilized to further determine which DLO may have been applied. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme for both global and local scenarios.