A comprehensive survey of image and video forgery techniques: variants, challenges, and future directions

With the advent of Internet, images and videos are the most vulnerable media that can be exploited by criminals to manipulate for hiding the evidence of the crime. This is now easier with the advent of powerful and easily available manipulation tools over the Internet and thus poses a huge threat to the authenticity of images and videos. There is no guarantee that the evidences in the form of images and videos are from an authentic source and also without manipulation and hence cannot be considered as strong evidence in the court of law. Also, it is difficult to detect such forgeries with the conventional forgery detection tools. Although many researchers have proposed advance forensic tools, to detect forgeries done using various manipulation tools, there has always been a race between researchers to develop more efficient forgery detection tools and the forgers to come up with more powerful manipulation techniques. Thus, it is a challenging task for researchers to develop h a generic tool to detect different types of forgeries efficiently. This paper provides the detailed, comprehensive and systematic survey of current trends in the field of image and video forensics, the applications of image/video forensics and the existing datasets. With an in-depth literature review and comparative study, the survey also provides the future directions for researchers, pointing out the challenges in the field of image and video forensics, which are the focus of attention in the future, thus providing ideas for researchers to conduct future research.