Improved image forgery localization method from a statistical perspective

Powerful image editing software makes the process of image manipulation easy, which increases security risks. Therefore, it is urgent to locate the tampered region to uncover the processing history. However, previous research has mainly focused on feature extraction, with little discussion on classifiers for classifying original and tampered regions. We improve the splicing forgery localization method from a statistical perspective. The refined color filter array feature provides sufficient data for statistical analysis, and the geometric mean is used to eliminate anomalous data. Subsequently, a classifier that combines the expectation–maximization algorithm and Bayesian theory is proposed to binarize the original and tampered regions. The two steps of feature extraction and feature classification are associated from a statistical perspective, which ultimately improve the performance of the method effectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the refined feature used for classification has several advantages, and the proposed classifier is appropriate for handling complex image manipulation across different statistical distributions. The proposed method outperforms the reference methods in both the Columbia and Korus datasets.