Detection and localization of double compression in MP3 audio tracks

In this work, by exploiting the traces left by double compression in the statistics of quantized modified discrete cosine transform coefficients, a single measure has been derived that allows to decide whether an MP3 file is singly or doubly compressed and, in the last case, to devise also the bit-rate of the first compression. Moreover, the proposed method as well as two state-of-the-art methods have been applied to analyze short temporal windows of the track, allowing the localization of possible tampered portions in the MP3 file under analysis. Experiments confirm the good performance of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that current detection methods are useful for tampering localization, thus offering a new tool for the forensic analysis of MP3 audio tracks.