The First-Digit Law application in digital forensics in crystal forgery research

One of the crown jewels of statistical folklore [1] is the first-digit law, also known as the Newcomb-Benford law, a phenomenon that is well-known to some but unknown to most. According to this rule, in an unaltered set of numbers, the number of occurrences for each first, starting from one and going up to nine, degrades logarithmically. JPEG, a popular digital image format and a widely used lossy compression algorithm, is a topic of strong interest for fields such as digital forensics. Since such images could have been easily manipulated and altered, the means to analyze this format are valuable when the authenticity of an image is important. The JPEG compression is examined in what follows from the standpoint of Benford's Law. We concentrate on techniques for analyzing fake photos and JPEG quality elements. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, we empirically show several properties that have not yet been covered in literature.