Copy-move image forgery involves digitally modifying an image by copying and pasting content, hiding foreground objects, or highlighting them through duplication. However, as digital image forgery can become an extremely unsafe and challenging technique to classify images effectively, therefore understanding the detection and classification of real and forgery images is essential. In this research, an improved butterfly optimization algorithmbased convolutional neural network (IBOA-CNN) is proposed for copy-move forgery detection (CMFD), enhancing accuracy and convergence speed by expanding the iteration memory. This proposed approach is used to detect and classify images as original or fake accurately and effectively using deep learning (DL). Initially, the image is obtained by the MICC-F220, MICC-F600, MICC-F2000, and CASIA 2.0 datasets and then image pre-processing is performed by converting Red Green Blue (RGB) into a grayscale image. The Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Wavelet Features (DWT), and ResNet-50 are utilized to extract the features from the images, IBOA is used for feature selection and finally, CNN is employed for the classification to classify CMFD as an original or fake image. Existing methods such as Stacked Sparse Denoising Autoencoder-Spotted Hyena Optimizer-Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm (SSDAE-SHO-GOA), Deep CNN using ResNet-101, and CNN are compared with the IBOA-based CNN approach using MICCF-2000 dataset. The proposed IBOA-based CNN achieves a better accuracy of 97.59%, 99.20%, 99.83%, and 98.92% for MICC-F220, MICC-F600, MICC-F2000, and CASIA 2.0 datasets compared with the existing methods like SSDAE-SHO-GOA, Deep CNN using ResNet-101, and CNN.