Two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images

Contrast enhancements, such as histogram equalization or gamma correction, are widely used by malicious attackers to conceal the cut-and-paste trails in doctored images. Therefore, detecting the traces left by contrast enhancements can be an effective way of exposing cut-and-paste image forgery. In this work, two improved forensic methods of detecting contrast enhancement in digital images are put forward. More specifically, the first method uses a quadratic weighting function rather than a simple cut-off frequency to measure the histogram distortion introduced by contrast enhancements, meanwhile the averaged high-frequency energy measure of his- togram is replaced by the ratio taken up by the high-frequency components in the histogram spectrum. While the second improvement is achieved by applying a linear-threshold strategy to get around the sensitivity of threshold selection. Compared with their original counterparts, these two methods both achieve better performance in terms of ROC curves and real-world cut-and-paste image forgeries. The effectiveness and improvement of the two proposed algorithms are experimentally validated on natural color images captured by commercial camera.