With the advent of Web 2.0 and ubiquitous adoption of low-cost and high-resolution digital cameras, users upload and share images on a daily basis. This trend of public image distribution and access to user-friendly editing software such as Photoshop and GIMP has made image forgery a serious issue. Splicing is one of the most common types of image forgery. It manipulates images by copying a region from one image (i.e., the donor image) and pasting it onto another image (i.e., the host or spliced image). Forgers often use splicing to give a false impression that there is an additional object present in the image, or to remove an object from the image. A spliced image from the Columbia Uncompressed [1] dataset is shown above. Image splicing can potentially be used in generating false propaganda for political purposes. For example, during the 2004 US Presidential election campaign, an image that showed John Kerry and Jane Fonda speaking together at an anti-Vietnam war protest was released and circulated. It was discovered later that this was a spliced image, and was created for political purposes. The spliced image and the two corresponding authentic images can be seen above [2].

Early work on image splicing detection only deduced whether a given image has been spliced or not, and no effort to localize the spliced area was attempted. The problem of joint splicing detection and localization has only been studied in recent years. For the problem of image splicing localization, one has to determine which pixels in an image have been manipulated as a result of a splicing operation.

One of the MCL members, Ronald Salloum, is currently working on an image splicing localization research project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In his research work, he is exploring the use of deep learning techniques to develop an effective solution to the problem of image splicing localization.

[1] Hsu, Y.-F., Chang, S.-F., 2006. Detecting image splicing using geometry invariants and camera characteristics consistency. In: 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. IEEE, pp. 549–552.

[2] Shi, Y. Q., Chen, C., Chen, W., 2007. A natural image model approach to splicing detection. In: Proceedings of the 9th workshop on Multimedia & security. ACM, pp. 51–62.