Detection and Localization of Image Tampering using Deep Residual UNET with Stacked Dilated Convolution

Image tampering detection and localization have become an active area of research in the field of digital image forensics in recent times. This is due to the widespread of malicious image tampering. This study presents a new method for image tampering detection and localization that combines the advantages of dilated convolution, residual network, and UNET Architecture. Using the UNET architecture as a backbone, we built the proposed network from two kinds of residual units, one for the encoder path and the other for the decoder path. The residual units help to speed up the training process and facilitate information propagation between the lower layers and the higher layers which are often difficult to train. To capture global image tampering artifacts and reduce the computational burden of the proposed method, we enlarge the receptive field size of the convolutional kernels by adopting dilated convolutions in the residual units used in building the proposed network. In contrast to existing deep learning methods, having a large number of layers, many network parameters, and often difficult to train, the proposed method can achieve excellent performance with a fewer number of parameters and less computational cost. To test the performance of the proposed method, we evaluate its performance in the context of four benchmark image forensics datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods and could be potentially used to enhance image tampering detection and localization.