Digital images can be easily tampered with image editing tools. The detection of tampering operations is of great importance. Passive digital image tampering detection aims at verifying the authenticity of digital images without any a prior knowledge on the original images. There are various methods proposed in this filed in recent years. In this paper, we present an overview of these methods in three levels, that is low level, middle level, and high level in semantic sense. The main ideas of the proposed approaches at each level are described in detail, and some comments are given. © 2009 Springer.