Image Forensics Using Non-Reducing Convolutional Neural Network for Consecutive Dual Operators

Digital image forensics has become necessary as an emerging technology. Images can be adulterated effortlessly using image tools. The latest techniques are available to detect whether an image is adulterated by a particular operator. Most of the existing techniques are suitable for high resolution and manipulated images by a single operator. In a real scenario, multiple operators are applied to manipulate the image many times. In this paper, a robust moderate-sized convolutional neural network is proposed to identify manipulation operators and also the operator’s sequence for two operators in particular. The proposed bottleneck approach is used to make the network deeper and reduce the computational cost. Only one pooling layer, called a global averaging pooling layer, is utilized to retain the maximum flow of information and to avoid the overfitting issue between the layers. The proposed network is also robust against low resolution and JPEG compressed images. Even though the detection of the operator is challenging due to the limited availability of statistical information in low resolution and JPEG compressed images, the proposed model can also detect an operator with different parameters and compression quality factors that are not considered in training.