Attacking contrast enhancement forensics in digital images

Currently, plenty of digital image forensic techniques have been proposed and used as diagnostic tools. It is urgent and significant to assess the reliability of such techniques applied in practical scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the security of existing digital image contrast enhancement (CE) forensic algorithms. From the standpoint of attackers, we propose two types of attacks, CE trace hiding attack and CE trace forging attack, which could invalidate the forensic detector and fabricate two types of forensic errors, respectively. The CE trace hiding attack is implemented by integrating local random dithering into the design of pixel value mapping. The CE trace forging attack is proposed by modifying the gray level histogram of a target pixel region to counterfeit peak/gap artifacts. Such trace forging attack is typically applied to create sophisticated composite images which could deceive the prior CE-based composition detectors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed CE anti-forensic schemes.