Concealability-rate-distortion tradeoff in image compression anti-forensics

Due to the ease with which digital multimedia content can be modified, a number of techniques to forensically detect forgeries have been developed. Meanwhile, anti-forensic operations have been developed to defeat forensic techniques. When anti-forensics is applied, a forger must balance between the amount that editing fingerprints have been concealed and the distortion introduced to the content. Additionally, the forger may compress the forgery for storage or transmission, which introduces a tradeoff between data rate and distortion. In this paper, we define a measure of an anti-forensic technique's effectiveness which we call concealability and examine the tradeoff between concealability, rate, and distortion. We then characterize the concealability-rate-distortion (C-R-D) surface for double JPEG compression anti-forensics. To do this, we propose a new technique known as flexible anti-forensic dither to hide double JPEG fingerprints. From our experiments, we identify two surprising results related to the C-R-D surface.