Detecting copy-move forgery under affine transforms for image forensics

In copy-move forgery, the copied region may be rotated and/or scaled to fit the scene better. Most of the existing methods fail when the region is subject to affine transforms. This paper presents a method for detecting this kind of image tampering based on circular pattern matching. The image is first filtered and divided into circular blocks. A rotation and scaling invariant feature is then extracted from each block using Polar Harmonic Transform (PHT). The feature vectors are then lexicographically sorted, and the forged regions are detected by finding the similar block pairs after proper post-processing. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the method. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.