Fast and effective Keypoint-based image copy-move forgery detection using complex-valued moment invariants

Abstract

Copy-move forgery is one of the most common image tampering schemes, with the potential use for misleading the opinion of the general public. Keypoint-based detection methods exhibit remarkable performance in terms of computational cost and robustness. However, these methods are difficult to effectively deal with the cases when 1) forgery only involves small or smooth regions, 2) multiple clones are conducted or 3) duplicated regions undergo geometric transformations or signal corruptions. To overcome such limitations, we propose a fast and accurate copy-move forgery detection algorithm, based on complex-valued invariant features. First, dense and uniform keypoints are extracted from the whole image, even in small and smooth regions. Then, these keypoints are represented by robust and discriminative moment invariants, where a novel fast algorithm is designed especially for the computation of dense keypoint features. Next, an effective magnitude-phase hierarchical matching strategy is proposed for fast matching a massive number of keypoints while maintaining the accuracy. Finally, a reliable post-processing algorithm is developed, which can simultaneously reduce false negative rate and false positive rate. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed scheme compared with existing state-of-the-art algorithms, with average pixel-level F-measure of 94.54% and average CPU-time of 36.25 s on four publicly available datasets.