An Improved Double Compression Detection Method for JPEG Image Forensics

Double JPEG image compression detection, or more specifically, double quantization detection, is an important digital image forensic method to detect the presence of image forgery or tampering. In this paper, we introduce an improved double quantization detection method to improve the accuracy of JPEG image tampering detection. We evaluate our detection method using the publicly available CASIA authentic and tampered image data set of 9501 JPEG images. We carry out 20 rounds of experiments with stringent parameter setting placed on our detection method to demonstrate its robustness. Each round of classifier is generated from a unique, non-overlapping and small subset composing of 1/20 of the tampered and 1/72 of the authentic images, to obtain a training data set of about 100 images per class, with the rest of the 19/20 of the tampered and 71/72 of the authentic images used for testing. Through the experiments, we show an average improvement of 40.31% and 44.85% in the true negative (TN) rate and true positive (TP) rate, respectively, when compared with the current state-of-the-art method. The average TN and TP rates obtained from 20 rounds of experiments carried out using our detection method, are 90.81% and 76.95%, respectively. The experimental results show that our JPEG image forensics method can support a reliable large-scale digital image evidence authenticity verification with consistent good accuracy. The low training to testing data ratio also indicates that our method is robust in practical applications even with a relatively limited or small training data set available.