Image Forensics from Chroma Subsampling of High-Quality JPEG Images

Lorch B, Riess C (2019)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2019

Event location: Paris

URI: https://faui1-files.cs.fau.de/public/publications/mmsec/2019-Lorch-IFC.pdf

Abstract

The JPEG compression format provides a rich source of forensic traces that include quantization artifacts, fingerprints of the container format, and numerical particularities of JPEG compressors. Such a diverse set of cues serves as the basis for a forensic examiner to determine origin and authenticity of an image.

In this work, we present a novel artifact that can be used to fingerprint the JPEG compression library. The artifact arises from chroma subsampling in one of the most popular JPEG implementations. Due to integer rounding, every second column of the compressed chroma channel appears on average slightly brighter than its neighboring columns, which is why we call the artifact a "chroma wrinkle". We theoretically derive the chroma wrinkle footprint in DCT domain, and use this footprint for detecting chroma wrinkles. The artifact is detected with more than 90% accuracy on images of JPEG quality 75 and above. Our experiments indicate that the artifact can also be used for manipulation localization, and that it is robust to several global postprocessing operations.

Authors with CRIS profile

Benedikt Lorch Lehrstuhl für Informatik 1 (IT-Sicherheitsinfrastrukturen) Christian Rieß Lehrstuhl für Informatik 1 (IT-Sicherheitsinfrastrukturen)

How to cite

APA:

Lorch, B., & Riess, C. (2019). Image Forensics from Chroma Subsampling of High-Quality JPEG Images. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security. Paris, FR.

MLA:

Lorch, Benedikt, and Christian Riess. "Image Forensics from Chroma Subsampling of High-Quality JPEG Images." Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security, Paris 2019.

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