Survey on passive methods of image tampering detection

Image security is a key issue in any field that makes use of digital images. Images have long been a part of forensic studies and law enforcement; for example images of criminals, images of crime scenes, biometric images, etc. With the advancement in digital imaging the usage of digital images in this particular field has become more pronounced. The huge development in digital image processing, as much as it has helped in the evolution of many new techniques in forensic studies, has also made image tampering easy. With the commercial availability of many state-of-the-art image editing tools, the authenticity of digital images has become a question. So the requirement of image tampering detection tools has been made inevitable. This paper presents a brief review of some of the latest passive tampering detection methods. A passive method is capable of detecting image forgery without any prior information about the image or its source and it detects tampering by identifying changes in the image properties like inconsistencies in lighting and changes in the mathematical properties of a raw digital image.