A Comprehensive Analysis of Image Forensics Techniques: Challenges and Future Direction

Background: Image forensics deal with the problem of authentication of pictures or their origins. There are two types of forensics techniques namely active and passive. Passive forgery is also known as blind forensics technique. In passive forgery, copy-move (cloning) image forensics is most common forgery technique. In this approach, an object or region of a picture is copied and positioned somewhere else in the same image. The active method used watermarking to solve picture genuineness problem. It has limitations like human involvement or particularly equipped cameras. To overwhelm these limitations, numerous passive authentication approaches have been developed. Moreover, both approaches do not require any prior information about the picture. Objective: The prime objective of this survey is to provide an inclusive summary as well as recent advancement, challenges and future direction in image forensics. In today’s digital era, digital pictures and videos are having a great impact on our life as well as society, as they became an important source of information. Though earlier it was very difficult to doctor the picture, nowadays digital pictures can be doctored easily with the help of editing tools and the internet. These practices make pictures as well as videos genuineness deceptive. Conclusion: This paper presents the current state-of-the-art of passive (cloning) image forensics techniques, challenges and future direction of this research domain. Furthermore, the major open issues in developing a robust cloning image forensics detector with their performance are discussed. Lastly, the available benchmark datasets are also discussed.