Exposing digital image forgeries by detecting discrepancies in motion blur

Abstract

The widespread availability of photo manipulation software has made it unprecedentedly easy to manipulate images for malicious purposes. Image splicing is one such form of tampering. In recent years, researchers have proposed various methods for detecting such splicing. In this paper, we present a novel method of detecting splicing in images, using discrepancies in motion blur. We use motion blur estimation through image gradients in order to detect inconsistencies between the spliced region and the rest of the image. We also develop a new measure to assist in inconsistent region segmentation in images that contain small amounts of motion blur. Experimental results show that our technique provides good segmentation of regions with inconsistent motion blur. We also provide quantitative comparisons with other existing blur-based techniques over a database of images. It is seen that our technique gives significantly better detection results.