Rotation Angle Estimation of JPEG Compressed Image by Cyclic Spectrum Analysis

Abstract

Image rotation is a common auxiliary method of image tampering, which can make the forged image more realistic from the geometric perspective. Most algorithms of image rotation angle estimation employ the peak value on the Fourier spectrum; however, JPEG post-processing brings additional peak interferences to the spectrum, which has a great impact on algorithm performance. In this paper, angle estimation is carried out for images compressed by JPEG. Firstly, the Fourier cyclic spectrum of image covariance is calculated, followed by semi-soft threshold wavelet transform to eliminate the block artefacts brought by JPEG compression. According to the shortest distance principle in the range of the limited amplitude, the processed cyclic spectral data are sorted to select the peak points. Finally, according to the selected peak point, the corresponding position coordinates of the theoretical peak point are found, and the rotation angle of the image is estimated by the theoretical peak point. Experimental results demonstrate that the average absolute error of the proposed algorithm is significantly lower than that of the state-of-the-art methods investigated, which highlights the promising potential of the proposed method as an image resampling detector in practical forensics applications.