Benford's law for detecting contrast enhancement

Detection of contrast enhancement operations is a quite researched topic in the field of Digital Image Forensics as the forgers often use it to conceal the visual traces left by some malicious altering of the image, such as cut-and-paste. Benford's law is an important concept from the field of statistics and it has been found to be followed by a large number of natural phenomena. In this paper, a possibility of using Benford's law for the detection of contrast enhancement has been analysed and it is found that Benford's law based features show promising capability in differentiating between contrast enhanced images and unaltered images. Further, results demonstrate that it also withstands an existing anti-forensic technique used to hide the artifacts introduced by contrast enhancement operation.