A comprehensive survey on image authentication for tamper detection with localization

The data that is stored or transmitted in digital form is susceptible to be attacked. Digital images are particularly vulnerable to unauthorized access and illicit alterations. As a result, image credibility verification approaches are constantly gaining popularity due to their importance in a variety of social concerns, including the government, military, forensics, and electronic commerce, among others. Even a minor attack could have disastrous consequences. Therefore, protecting images from tampering has become increasingly crucial. Many approaches have been developed in the literature to ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital images. These methodologies can be grouped into active and passive approaches for image authentication and tampering detection. Active image authentication has a general solution based on watermarking, signature and hybrid techniques. Passive authentication, on the other hand, relies on the image’s inherent natural characteristics to provide implicit authentication. Digital image forensic tools have been utilized for identifying the signs of digital tampering. We have found from the literature of the past three decades that image credibility verification approaches have achieved promising results. However, accurate image tamper localization remains an unsolved problem and a fairly difficult task too, if it is performed carefully with expertise. This motivated us to present a comprehensive review of image authentication techniques, which enables not only image tamper detection but also localize the manipulated region. We also discussed the future work.