Transform Coder Classification for Digital Image Forensics

The area of non-intrusive forensic analysis has found many applications in the area of digital imaging. One unexplored area is the identification of source coding in digital images. In other words, given a digital image, can we identify which compression scheme was used, if any? This paper focuses on the aspect of transform coder classification, where we wish to determine which transform was used during compression. This scheme analyzes the histograms of coefficient subbands to determine the nature of the transform method. By obtaining the distance between the obtained histogram and the estimate of the original histogram, we can determine if the image was compressed using the transform tested. Results show that this method can successfully classify compression by transform as well as detect whether any compression has occurred at all in an image.