A gradient-based pixel-domain attack against SVM detection of global image manipulations

We present a gradient-based attack against SVM-based forensic techniques relying on high-dimensional SPAM features. As opposed to prior work, the attack works directly in the pixel domain even if the relationship between pixel values and SPAM features can not be inverted. The proposed method relies on the estimation of the gradient of the SVM output with respect to pixel values, however it departs from gradient descent methodology due to the necessity of preserving the integer nature of pixels and to reduce the effect of the attack on image quality. A fast algorithm to estimate the gradient is also introduced to reduce the complexity of the attack. We tested the proposed attack against SVM detection of histogram stretching, adaptive histogram equalization and median filtering. In all cases the attack succeeded in inducing a decision error with a very limited distortion, the PSNR between the original and the attacked images ranging from 50 to 70 dBs. The attack is also effective in the case of attacks with Limited Knowledge (LK) when the SVM used by the attacker is trained on a different dataset with respect to that used by the analyst.