A convolutive mixing model for shifted double JPEG compression with application to passive image authentication

The artifacts by JPEG recompression have been demonstrated to be useful in passive image authentication. In this paper, we focus on the shifted double JPEG problem, aiming at identifying if a given JPEG image has ever been compressed twice with inconsistent block segmentation. We formulated the shifted double JPEG compression (SD-JPEG) as a noisy convolutive mixing model mostly studied in blind source separation (BSS). In noise free condition, the model can be solved by directly applying the independent component analysis (ICA) method with minor constraint to the contents of natural images. In order to achieve robust identification in noisy condition, the asymmetry of the independent value map (IVM) is exploited to obtain a normalized criteria of the independency. We generate a total of 13 features to fully represent the asymmetric characteristic of the independent value map and then feed to a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experiment results on a set of 1000 images, with various parameter settings, demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.