MULTIPLE JPEG COMPRESSION DETECTION THROUGH TASK-DRIVEN NON-NEGATIVE MATRIX FACTORIZATION

Due to the increasingly unbridled practice of sharing visual content on the web, tracing back past history of uploaded images is getting far from being an easy task. Nonetheless, forensic analysts might be interested in probing digital history of content published on the web to assess its authenticity. In this vein, a possible indicator of image integrity is the number of JPEG compressions a picture underwent. As a matter of fact, JPEG compression is typically operated first at image inception time directly on the acquisition device. Then, it is customary re-applied every time an image is manipulated or shared through social media. For this reason, the more the applied JPEG compressions, the more the likelihood that an image underwent some editing. In this work, we propose an algorithm to detect multiple JPEG compressions, specifically up to four coding cycles. This approach leverages the Task-driven Non-negative Matrix Factorization (TNMF) model, fed with histograms of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) of the image under analysis. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method if compared with the state-of-the-art, confirming this strategy as a viable solution for detecting multiple JPEG compressions.