To improve the poor robustness and low accuracy of the existing algorithms of image splicing detection, a novel passive image forgery detection method is proposed in this study, which is based on DOCT (discrete octonion cosine transform) and Markov. By introducing the octonion and DOCT, the colour information of six image channels (the RGB model and the HSI model) can be exhaustively extracted, which enhances the robustness of the algorithm. On the issue of improving the detection accuracy, the standard deviation is used to characterise the relationship of the colour information between the parts of DOCT coefficient matrix, and the K‐fold cross‐validation is introduced to improve the identification performance of the classifier. The steps of the algorithm are as follows: Firstly, the 8 × 8 block DOCT transform is used to the original image to obtain parts of block DOCT coefficient. Secondly, the standard deviation is used to process the corresponding parts of all blocks of the image. Finally, the Markov feature vector of the DOCT coefficient is extracted and feds to the LIBSVM (a library for support vector machines). When using LIBSVM for classification, K‐fold cross‐validation is executed to select the best parameter pairs. The experiment results demonstrate that the algorithm is superior to the other state‐of‐the‐art splicing detection methods.