Digital image forgery: taxonomy, techniques, and tools–a comprehensive study

Editing and manipulating digital images using easily available open-source software along with powerful commercial software has led to one of the serious issues in the area of multimedia forensics. Though most of the users use these applications for fun when once the user tries to change the image content, intending to mislead the whole information transformed by the image such kind of action needs attention over the intention of the users. The digital image plays a significant role in various areas mainly in forensic investigation, science, digital media, intelligence systems, surveillance systems, a court of law, medical imaging, Journalism, and so on that utilize digital images as evidence for findings. Therefore verifying digital image authenticity and integrity is one of the most raising issues and challenges in the area of digital image forgeries. This survey focuses on various existing image tampering methods, a comparison of various techniques used in detecting, commonly applied detection tools that are used in identifying tampering, along with the discussion on existing tampered image datasets and performance metrics considered for evaluation. Further, the paper discusses several challenges and issues. The technical review article is designed to assist future researchers in the field and provide valuable insights.