Mathematical Models for Digital Imaging and their Applications in Digital Image Forensics

With rapid technological advancements in the last few decades, our information and communication systems are progressively moving towards being completely digitized. Simultaneously, as a consequence of modern networking technologies, a plethora of digital information is being stored and transmitted in a couple of seconds. Highly appreciated multimedia enabled handheld devices are empowering even the common man to communicate on the go. Today, our understanding of events is highly dependent on visual information. Consequently, digital images have become a prominent carrier of information. Dependence of our lifestyles on digital images leads to the critical importance of their security and reliability. In parallel to the technological advancement, availability of software tools capable of easily manipulating digital images in a user-friendly manner is not so rare. With this, the trust we keep on digital image as proof of an event is at risk. This chapter presents an introduction to the emerging field of digital image forensics, which aims to provide authenticity and security to digital images. This introduction is followed by detailed analysis of one class of image forensic methods, methods based on color filter array interpolation. An experimental comparison of some prominent works and recent developments in this field on a common dataset has been discussed in this chapter.

Keywords: Bayer pattern, Camera classification, CFA de-mosaicking, CFA forensics, CFA pattern, Color filter array (CFA), De-mosaicking artifacts, Digital camera, Digital color imaging, Digital image forensics, Digital image forgery, Image authenticity, Image forgery detection, Image source classification, Image tampering, Information processing and management, Information technology and security, Intelligent systems, Multimedia forensics, Multimedia security, Nonintrusive image forensics, Tampering detection.