Region duplication forgery detection technique based on SURF and HAC.

Region duplication forgery detection is a special type of forgery detection approach and widely used research topic under digital image forensics. In copy move forgery, a specific area is copied and then pasted into any other region of the image. Due to the availability of sophisticated image processing tools, it becomes very hard to detect forgery with naked eyes. From the forged region of an image no visual clues are often detected. For making the tampering more robust, various transformations like scaling, rotation, illumination changes, JPEG compression, noise addition, gamma correction, and blurring are applied. So there is a need for a method which performs efficiently in the presence of all such attacks. This paper presents a detection method based on speeded up robust features (SURF) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC). SURF detects the keypoints and their corresponding features. From these sets of keypoints, grouping is performed on the matched keypoints by HAC that shows copied and pasted regions.