Detecting Morphological Filtering of Binary Images

Morphological operators are widely used in binary image processing for several purposes, such as removing noise, detecting contours or particular structures, and regularizing shapes. In particular, morphological filters are largely adopted in scanned documents to correct the artifacts caused by acquisition and binarization, as well as other processing. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for forensics detection of morphological filtering on binary images. The proposed technique exploits some mathematical properties of the two basic morphologic operators, erosion and dilation, to define an algorithm able not only to detect the application of the filter, but also to estimate the shape of the relevant structuring element. Experimental tests demonstrate that the technique is effective and robust to the most common operations performed on binary image documents.