Abstract Due to the ease in manipulation of digital images with various existing photo editing tools and softwares the task of authentication and identifying the reliability of digital image has become a major concern. Copy-move forgery detection (CMFD) is therefore known to be one of the key-domains in the latest digital image authentication study. Copy-move forgery is a passive approach in which a portion of an image is copied and then pasted onto the same image, resulting in a tampered image. In this paper, current developments in CMFD have been surveyed and a comparative evaluation of recent CMFD techniques has been done along with its advantages and limitations. Also, a detailed description of relevant copy-move forgery detection datasets is provided which will help the researchers to decide which dataset to choose for a given CMFD approach.