Passive forgery detection aims to detect traces of image tampering without the need for prior information. With the increasing demand for image content protection, passive detection methods able to identify image tampering areas are increasingly needed. However, most current passive approaches either work only for image-level JPEG compression detection and cannot localize region-level forgery, or suffer from high-false detection rates in localizing altered regions. This paper proposes an effective approach based on discrete cosine transform coefficient analysis for the detection and localization of altered regions of JPEG compressed images. This approach can also work with altered JPEG images resaved in JPEG compressed format with different quality factors. Experiments with various tampering methods such as copy-and-paste, image completion, and composite tampering, show that the proposed approach is able to effectively detect and localize altered areas and is not sensitive to image contents such as edges and textures.
