ACE-An Effective Anti-forensic Contrast Enhancement Technique

Detecting Contrast Enhancement (CE) in images and anti-forensic approaches against such detectors have gained much attention in multimedia forensics lately. Several contrast enhancement detectors analyze the first order statistics such as histogram of images to determine whether an image is CE or not. In order to counter these detectors various anti-forensic techniques have been proposed. This led to a technique that utilized second order statistics of images for CE detection. In this paper, we propose an effective anti-forensic approach that performs CE without significant distortion in both the first and second order statistics of the enhanced image. We formulate an optimization problem using a variant of the well known Total Variation (TV) norm image restoration formulation. Experiments show that the algorithm effectively overcomes the first and second order statistics based detectors without loss in quality of the enhanced image.