Digital Image Forgery Detection using Deep Learning

Abstract: The rapid advancement of image editing software and the emergence of sophisticated generative AI have made digital image forgery a significant challenge for modern information security. Traditional detection techniques, which often rely on manual inspection or basic mathematical heuristics to identify common manipulations like copy-move, splicing, and retouching, are increasingly becoming obsolete. These older methods struggle to keep pace with the seamless blending and high-resolution outputs produced by modern neural networks. As a result, there is an urgent need for automated, robust systems capable of uncovering subtle artifacts that are invisible to the human eye, ensuring the integrity of digital media in an era of “deepfakes” and hyper-realistic edits. This paper addresses these vulnerabilities by designing and implementing a deep learning-based system specifically engineered for the high-precision detection of digital image forgery. By leveraging the hierarchical feature-extraction capabilities of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the proposed system can automatically learn the “fingerprints” of various manipulation tools. Unlike traditional methods, this CNN-based approach focuses on detecting local inconsistencies in noise patterns, lighting distributions, and compression artifacts that occur when an image is tampered with. This allows the system to pinpoint forged regions with a high degree of granularity and accuracy, regardless of whether the edit was a simple copy-move or a complex AI-driven synthesis. To ensure the model is effective in real-world scenarios, it is trained on extensive, large-scale datasets containing a diverse range of both authentic and manipulated imagery. This comprehensive training enables the model to generalize its findings, allowing it to identify new and previously unseen forgery types across different file formats and resolutions. The ultimate outcome of this paper is to provide a reliable framework for authenticity verification that can be deployed across various sectors. From assisting journalists in verifying eyewitness media to providing forensic evidence in legal proceedings and strengthening cybersecurity defenses, this system aims to restore trust in digital content by providing a transparent and adaptive layer of security.