A novel method for real-time object-based copy-move tampering localization in videos using fine-tuned YOLO V8

The research community faces challenges for video forgery detection techniques as advancements in multimedia technology have made it easy to alter the original video content and share it on electronic and social media with false propaganda. The copy-move attack is the most commonly practiced type of attack in videos/images, where an object is copied and moved into the current frame or any other frame of the video. Hence an illusion of recreation can be created to forge the content. It is very difficult to differentiate to uncover the forgery traces by the naked eye. Hence, a passive method-based algorithm is proposed to scientifically investigate the statistical properties of the video by normalizing the median difference of the frames at the pixel level, and graphical analysis successfully shows the clear peak in the forged region. After that, a new deep learning approach, “You Only Look at Once”, the latest eighth version of YOLO, is tuned and trained for the localization of forged objects in the real-time domain. The validation and testing results obtained from the trained YOLO V8 are successfully able to detect and localize the forged objects in the videos with mean average precision (mAP) of 0.99, recall is 0.99, precision is 0.99, and highest confidence score. The proposed YOLO V8 is fine-tuned in three different ways, and the performance of the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of inference speed, accuracy, precision, recall, testing, and training time.