A statistical feature based approach to distinguish PRCG from photographs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2014.07.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A method to distinguish photographic images and photorealistic computer graphics is proposed.

  • A customized statistical feature, named texture similarity, is defined.

  • Proposed method used Homomorphic filtering to highlight the image detail information.

  • Proposed method is robust for content-preserving manipulations.

  • Proposed method provides satisfactory detection accuracy and generalization capability.

Abstract

We present a passive forensics method to distinguish photorealistic computer graphics (PRCG) from natural images (photographs). The goals of our work are to improve the detection accuracy and the robustness to content-preserving image manipulations. In the proposed method, Homomorphic filtering is used to highlight the detail information of image. We find that the texture changes are different between photographs and PRCG images under same Homomorphic filtering transformation, and then we use the difference matrixes to describe the differences of texture changes. We define a customized statistical feature, named texture similarity, and combine it with the statistical features extracted from the co-occurrence matrixes of differential matrixes to construct forensics features. Then we develop a statistical model and use SVM as classifier to distinguish PRCG from photographs. Experimental results show that the proposed method enjoys following advantages: (1) Proposed method reaches higher detection accuracy, synchronously, it is robust to tolerate content-preserving manipulations such as JPEG compression, adding noise, histogram equalization, and filtering. (2) Proposed method is provided with satisfactory generalization capability, it will be available when the training samples and the testing samples come from different sources.

Introduction

With the rapid growth and widespread using of digital cameras and mobile phones, photos and pictures can be obtained when and where. At the same time, rapid development of computer vision and computer graphic technologies, make it is more convenient to generate the photorealistic computer graphics (PRCG). These PRCG are so realistic that it is very difficult to differentiate them from photographs and pictures by human eyes. See Fig. 1. The old adage of “seeing is believing” is no longer true. This trend has brought new issues and challenges for us concerning the authenticity of digital images. Therefore, identifying PRCG from photographs has become an important topic in the field of media application.

Photographs are those pictures that are captured from real-world by imaging device such as camera. PRCG are scene images that does not exist in reality; it is generated only by computers and graphic software through the following process: first, a 3D polygon model is built to simulate a desire shape, then color, texture and simulate light irradiation are given to this model. At last, PRCG is imaged using a virtual camera. Recent advances in computer graphics are bring an amazing result, that is, it is possible to create models that are physically accurate without visual artifacts and lighting inconsistencies. Therefore, distinguishing PRCG from photographs is a very challenging problem.

There are many established methodologies to distinguish PRCG from photographs in recent years. The majority of existing methods in literature are based on statistical learning model, in which, the features of inconsistency between photographs and PRCG are used for classification. Therefore, the main difference of existing approaches lies on the features extraction, and features extraction methods can be classified into two categories, the first is based on transform domain and the second is based on the physical characteristics of the imaging equipment.

Taking a general survey on existing methods, there are some problems such as lower detection precision, weaker robustness and unsatisfactory stability. In our work, we aim at improving the detection accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability, and seek for new features that are able to distinguish photographs and PRCG. We find that the texture changes are different between photographs and computer-generated images under same Homomorphic filtering transformation, so we use Homomorphic filtering to highlight the image detail information. Considering that the Contourlet transformation has multi-direction selectivity and anisotropy, and can be used to describe the inherent characteristics of image, we use the statistic features of the Contourlet sub-bands to construct the distinguishing features. We define a customized statistical feature, named texture similarity, and combine it with the statistical features extracted from the co-occurrence matrix of differential matrixes to construct forensics features. Then we develop a statistical model, and use the least squares SVM as a classifier to classify PRCG from photographs. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only possesses satisfactory detection accuracy, also, it is robust to tolerate content-preserving manipulations, and provides satisfactory generalization capability for different image data sets.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we introduce the relational works. The proposed method is described in Section 3. Section 4 contains experimental results. Finally, a short summary are presented in Section 5.

Section snippets

Related works

The earliest approaches to distinguish photographs and PRCG were proposed by Ng and Chang [1] and Lyu and Farid [2], respectively. Work [1] presented a classification approach that used the natural image statistics features composed of 33-dimensional (33-D) power spectrum features, 24-D local patch features and 72-D wavelet higher-order statistics. Subsequently, a geometry-based approach [3] was proposed by the same authors to model the physical differences between PRCG and photographs, in

Proposed method

Although PRCG are so realistic that it is very difficult to be differentiated from photographs by human’s eyes, but the imaging mechanism and imaging process are completely dissimilar. The imaging process of the photographs is very complex since it is inevitably influenced by both natural environment and acquisition equipment, while the process of generating a PRCG only primitively simulates the imaging process of photographs. These differences will lead to different characteristics in many

Experimental results and analysis

In this section, we use experimental results to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Our algorithm is implemented and tested using MATLAB2010a, and our experiment is performed on the computer with Processor Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU, E5400 @ 2.70 GHz, 2.00 GB RAM.

Conclusions

Nowadays, computer imagery and computer generated images touch many aspects of our daily life. Computer graphics are getting so photorealistic that it has brought new challenges towards the credibility of digital images. Identifying photorealistic computer graphics from photographs has become an important topic in the field of media application.

In this paper, we aimed at improving the detection accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability, simultaneously, proposed a new approach to

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr. Zhaohong Li for her kindness by providing us with their codes. We also would like to acknowledge the helpful comments and kindly suggestions provided by anonymous referees.

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    This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under Grant No. 2012CB316400; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61075007 and No. 61273252.

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