Grey wolf assisted SIFT for improving copy move image forgery detection

Abstract

Copy-move forgery is a general widespread type of digital image forgery, where a segment of an image is attached into a new portion of the similar image to hide or replicate the parts which are called forgered image. The forgered image appears original, as the objective region in spite of being forged, has attained the fundamental qualities of the similar image itself. The capability of the copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) technique is lacked due to some post-processing functions, like JPEG compression scaling, or rotation, etc. Therefore, this paper intends to develop a CMFD using Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), best-fin-first algorithm (BBF) and RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) directed by grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm. Initially, the keypoints are selected using SIFT principle, and BBF algorithm identifies the matched keypoints using keypoint threshold. Further, SIFT feature descriptor is determined, and the final extracted paired keypoints are given to RANSAC algorithm to remove all the mismatched keypoints. In this CMFD model, the parameters such as parameters keypoint threshold, maximum distance of inliers in RANSAC and distance threshold in SIFT features are optimized using GWO. The foremost purpose of this research work is maximizing the number of paired keypoints. Hence the proposed model is termed as GWO-based parameter optimization for CMFD (GWPO-CMD). The proposed model is compared over several other meta-heuristic-based keypoint threshold selections and proves its efficiency through diverse analysis.