Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Previous forensic techniques have exploited various characteristics of JPEG compression to reveal traces of manipulation in digital images. We describe a JPEG artifact that can arise depending on the choice of the mathematical operator used to convert DCT coefficients from floating-point to integer values. We show that the more commonly used floor or ceiling operators (but not the round operator) introduce a periodic artifact in the form of a single darker or brighter pixel - which we term a dimple - in 8 × 8 pixel blocks. We describe the nature of this artifact, its prevalence in commercial cameras, and how this artifact can be quantified and used to detect a wide range of digital manipulations from content-aware fill to re-sampling, airbrushing, and compositing.
Agarwal et al. (2017) studied this question.