Unsupervised Forgery Detection of Documents: A Network-Inspired Approach

The area of forgery detection of documents is considered an active field of research in digital forensics. One of the most common issues that investigators struggle with is circled around the selection of the approach in terms of accuracy, complexity, cost, and ease of use. The literature includes many approaches that are based on either image processing techniques or spectrums analysis. However, most of the available approaches have issues related to complexity and accuracy. This article suggests an unsupervised forgery detection framework that utilizes the correlations among the spectrums of documents’ matters in generating a weighted network for the tested documents. The network, then, is clustered using several unsupervised clustering algorithms. The detection rate is measured according to the number of network clusters. Based on the obtained results, our approach provides high accuracy using the Louvain clustering algorithms, while the use of the updated version of the DBSAN was more successful when testing many documents at the same time. Additionally, the suggested framework is considered simple to implement and does not require professional knowledge to use.