Exposing digital forgeries through chromatic aberration

Abstract

Virtually all optical imaging systems introduce a variety of aberrations into an image. Chromatic aberration, for example, results from the failure of an optical system to perfectly focus light of different wavelengths. Lateral chromatic aberration manifests itself, to a first-order approximation, as an expansion/contraction of color channels with respect to one another. When tampering with an image, this aberration is often disturbed and fails to be consistent across the image. We describe a computational technique for automatically estimating lateral chromatic aberration and show its efficacy in detecting digital tampering.