UNVEILING VESTIGES OF MAN-MADE MODIFICATIONS ON MOLECULAR-BIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT IMAGES

There are always inaccurate image data, in a scientific paper, created by inappropriate post-processing operations. Hence, we propose in this paper a fast algorithm able to expose man-made invisible modifications on molecular-biological images. We designed an optimization equation to separate the approximated trend component from the input image. Then, we utilize the difference between the input and its approximated trend to bring out the discontinuities within the input image. We applied our method on a blind test image set and images extracted from papers that have been questioned by the public. The experiment results show that there indeed exist unnatural patterns on several screened images. Because screening for fabricated images on published papers is a sensitive topic, our MATLAB code will be released only after we present this paper at IEEE GlobalSIP 2018.