Harnessing motion blur to unveil splicing

The extensive availability of sophisticated image editing tools has rendered it relatively easy to produce fake images. Image splicing is a form of tampering in which an original image is altered by copying a portion from a different source. Because the phenomenon of motion blur is a common occurrence in hand-held cameras, we propose a passive method to automatically detect image splicing using blur as a cue. Specifically, we address the scenario of a static scene in which the cause of blur is due to hand shake. Existing methods for dealing with this problem work only in the presence of uniform space-invariant blur. In contrast, our method can expose the presence of splicing by evaluating inconsistencies in motion blur even under space-variant blurring situations. We validate our method on several examples for different scene situations and camera motions of interest. © 2014 IEEE.