Image region duplication detection based on circular window expansion and phase correlation

Abstract Region duplication forgery is one of the tampering techniques that are frequently used, where a part of an image is copied and pasted into another part of the same image. In this paper, a phase correlation method based on polar expansion and adaptive band limitation is proposed for region duplication forgery detection. Our method starts by calculating the Fourier transform of the polar expansion on overlapping windows pair, and then an adaptive band limitation procedure is implemented to obtain a correlation matrix in which the peak is effectively enhanced. After estimating the rotation angle of the forgery region, a searching algorithm in the sense of seed filling is executed to display the whole duplicated region. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can detect duplicated region with high accuracy and robustness to rotation, illumination adjustment, blur and JPEG compression while rotation angle is estimated precisely for further calculation.