A passive authentication scheme for copy-move forgery based on package clustering algorithm

Copy-move forgery as one of popular methods is widely used to tamper digital images. Passive authentication is extensively used to detect the copy-move forgery images. This paper proposes a passive authentication scheme for copy-move forgery based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and the package clustering algorithm. The copy regions and paste regions can be automatically detected in doctored digital images. This scheme works by first applying the DCT to small fixed image blocks to obtain their features and the size of feature vectors are reduced. Moreover, the package clustering algorithm is applied to replace the general lexicographic order technologies to improve the detection precision. The similar blocks can be found by comparing the feature vectors in each package. The experimental results represent that the proposed scheme can locate irregular and meaningful tampered regions and multiply duplicated regions in a suspicious image. The duplicated regions can also be located in digital images that are distorted by adding white Gaussian noise, Gaussian blurring and their mixed operations.