Undetectable image tampering through JPEG compression anti-forensics

Abstract

Recently, a number of digital image forensic techniques have been developed which are capable of identifying an image's origin, tracing its processing history, and detecting image forgeries. Though these techniques are capable of identifying standard image manipulations, they do not address the possibility that anti-forensic operations may be designed and used to hide evidence of image tampering. In this paper, we propose an anti-forensic operation capable of removing blocking artifacts from a previously JPEG compressed image. Furthermore, we show that by using this operation along with another anti-forensic operation which we recently proposed, we are able to fool forensic methods designed to detect evidence of JPEG compression in decoded images, determine an image's origin, detect double JPEG compression, and identify cut-and-paste image forgeries.