Improving the Computational Cost for Copied Region Detection in Forensic Images

This research work develops a new method to detect the forgery in image by combining the Wavelet transform and modified Zernike Moments (MZMs) in which the features are defined from more pixels than in traditional Zernike Moments. The tested image is firstly converted to grayscale and applied one level Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to reduce the size of image by a half in both sides. The approximation sub-band (LL), which is used for processing, is then divided into overlapping blocks and modified Zernike moments are calculated in each block as feature vectors. More pixels are considered, more sufficient features are extracted. Lexicographical sorting and correlation coefficients computation on feature vectors are next steps to find the similar blocks. The purpose of applying DWT to reduce the dimension of the image before using Zernike moments with updated coefficients is to improve the computational time and increase exactness in detection. Copied or duplicated parts will be detected as traces of copy-move forgery manipulation based on a threshold of correlation coefficients and confirmed exactly from the constraint of Euclidean distance. Comparisons results between proposed method and related ones prove the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.