Abstract. Attention to tampering by median filtering (MF) has recently increased in digital image forensics. For the MF detection (MFD), this paper presents a feature vector that is extracted from two kinds of variations between the neighboring line pairs: the row and column directions. Of these variations in the proposed method, one is defined by a gradient difference of the intensity values between the neighboring line pairs, and the other is defined by a coefficient difference of the Fourier transform (FT) between the neighboring line pairs. Subsequently, the constructed 19-dimensional feature vector is composed of these two parts. One is the extracted 9-dimensional from the space domain of an image and the other is the 10-dimensional from the frequency domain of an image. The feature vector is trained in a support vector machine classifier for MFD in the altered images. As a result, in the measured performances of the experimental items, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC, ROC) by the sensitivity (P TP : the true positive rate) and 1-specificity (P FP : the false-positive rate) are above 0.985 and the classification ratios are also above 0.979. P e (a minimal average decision error) ranges from 0 to 0.024, and P TP at P FP ¼ 0.01 ranges from 0.965 to 0.996. It is confirmed that the grade evaluation of the proposed variation-based MF detection method is rated as "Excellent (A)" by AUC is above 0.9. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.