FORENSICS OF JPEG IMAGES

Abstract

Social networking platforms extensively employ digital images for sharing visual information. The accessibility of user-friendly image editing software has facilitated the creation of convincingly authentic counterfeits. In order to validate the contents of digital images even in the face of adversary activities, it is therefore vital to create strong forensic tools. JPEG formats have achieved substantial popularity, establish ing themselves as one of the most extensively utilized image formats. In the field of digital image forensics, having a thorough understanding of the JPEG format’s funda mental properties can be of great value. The three main artifacts associated with JPEG compression are quantization, rounding, and truncation. We investigate how these ar tifacts affect JPEG forensics through theoretical research. We investigate anti-forensic methods that effectively gets rid of the blocking artifacts of earlier JPEG compression in an image. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical usefulness of this method in deceptive forensic methodologies explicitly developed to determine image origins, de tect instances of double JPEG compression, and find instances of manipulated image forgeries using cut-and-paste methods.