Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries
Several readers wrote in with a Wired story about the work Adobe is doing to detect photo forgery. They are working with Canon and Reuters (which suffered massive bad publicity last year over a doctored war photo) and a professor from Dartmouth. (Here is Reuters's policy on photo editing.) Adobe plans to produce a suite of photo-authentication tools based on the work of Hany Farid (PDF) for release in 2008.
how are you going to detect forgeries when there is an editorial decision to use a forgery to present biased news (see al-ruters) ? shouldnt this be something the general public should hae to put a check on the mainstream media.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
PDF is boring. HTML is awesome. Here's the work of Hany Faid in HTML, courtesy of Google.
Warning : The photo you are trying to open may have been altered. Allow / Cancel?
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I can't help thinging that matching images to individual cameras will be a dangerous step, particularly for those working in less 'democratic' counties. I hope this will be an option that can be turned off, but I expect it will not.
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
Besides image manipulation, there is also the problem of staged photographs, as seen in some of the photographs from the recent war in Lebanon. This can't be solved with technology.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Thats fine that Adobe's creating this software, but the bottom line is poor control with reuters. When reuters can prove their internal controls will stop altered images from making it to press, thats when their integrity may start to come back.
Is such a thing possible? Could it be that my meticulously gathered and maintained gallery of explicit photos of Star Trek personnel is less than authentic? Why was I informed of this earlier?
Life needs more saving throws.
Thus begins another arms race.
If there is a tool for detecting forgeries, then the forgery tools will evolve to defeat it. With its help.
Welcome, Ape Lords, to the Information Age. You'll find that your cultures, mores, traditions, rituals, and sensibilities are woefully outdated. But please, don't let that stop you from legislatively forcing your old argrarian peg into this very new, very round hole.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
So kill yourself- or are you too much of a pathetic sniveling coward? Yeah, I thought so.
Bad "publicity" is the least of what "Al-Reuters" suffers from.
Is to build a Trusted Imaging Infrastructure. DRM in the camera will sign the pictures as being genuine with a public key. This will obviously need a new image file format, .TII. This will be proprietary and tied down with patents, and the patent licenses will force licensees to not re sign edited images. Obviously this will mean that cameras and computers will need to implement a Trusted Imaging Infrastrusture too, to make sure that people are unable to resign images after editing them. Unsigned images or images in legacy file formats will be downsampled and POSSIBLY FAKE will be watermarked across them when they are shown on compliant operating systems. Trusted images will be handled by a protected part of the operating system. Possibly CPU maufacturers will add support for trusted image editing functionality in the form of efuses that cause the CPU to self destruct when asked to edit a TII file.
I propose a TII licensing authority composed of Adobe, various camera manufacturers, Microsoft and Apple to arrange the NDAs and licenses. Obviously illegal legacy image editing tools like GIMP will be imported from non TII approved countries, but they must be seized under the DMCA and their owners sent to Gitmo.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
With as much wireless technology as there is at our disposal, wouldn't it be possible to create a program that would automatically generate authenticity verification files as soon as a camera was hooked up to the computer (and sent to a server)? Better yet, a version of photoshop for people in the news industry that has manipulative tools locked. Wouldn't something like that be more feasible?
Will it involve digital micro dots?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Don't listen to my evil twin AC. There is always hope while you're alive. Just keep going. :)
If digital cameras did some sort of "unbreakable" digital signature via steganography or checksum or something when pictures were snapped. In this day and age I think that would be great. You snap a picture, and bam the pixels are embedded with something such that an alterations to the picture could be detected.
How is Adobe going to find other faked war photos like these?
6 384.jpg1 291.jpg
o man2.jpg
http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/r189189
http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/r357735
or the woman who shows up to cry over every and all bombed buildings in Reuters' world
http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/beirutw
Source - http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
So now they're making both Photoshop and Anti-Photoshop? Whon't those two take out each other? Like pasta and anti-pasta?
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
Couldn't the camera just place the signature in the Exif data. That way we could know that the photo in question came directly from the camera with serial number XYZ?
Of course i can doctor my photo, print it and then rephotograph it. Damn analog hole.
http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/publications .html
I'm familiar with some of her work. Specifically, the papers "Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images", "Determining Digital Image Origin Using Sensor Imperfections", "Digital Bullet Scratches for Images", "Digital Camera Identification from Sensor Noise",
However, the paper "Detecting Digital Image Forgeries Using Sensor Pattern Noise" from last year covers the topic of this article perfectly.
--Thomas J. Owens
However, it is impossible for Reuters (known by many as "al-Reuters") or AP (a.k.a. Associated [with terrorists] Press) not to know that they're being "used." In fact, they are willing accomplices, for the old-line media are now and have been for three decades in league with any and every force arrayed against the United States of America, in the interest of "giving both sides of the story."
Up next: a parade of "mainstream media" executive-types testifying before the U.S. Congress in favor of "the fairness doctrine," so they can gain their hegemony back through legal fiat, that they lost through their own arrogant duplicity.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
If you were able to figure out how the software works you might be able to make undetectable forgeries. At the very least, if you had a copy, you could use it to see if your changes will be detected.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
between:
the Red Cross claiming Israel shot a missile into one of their ambulances
and
U.S. intelligence agencies being adamant about Iraq having WMD's to get enough support to launch an invasion there
I'd say things are just nicely balancing out.
Only shame is that Shame it's a balance of lies rather than truths. Welcome to the status quo of the world since 'civilization' started, though.
This is a technical solution to a social problem. The problem is that journalists wish to change the world, and they can change it by slanting the news to conform with their personal beliefs. Also, journalists who merely report what goes on are derided as "police blotter reporters" or worse. It's expected that they'll go out of their way to make a story where none existed before. The idea that fraud detection will eliminate photo forgeries is naive, because they will always happen.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned.
Am I the only one that found this sentence in the introduction more than a little scary?
Say, Tom takes a picture of his friend Mary and posts it online. Some time later, they cease being friends, and Mary does something terribly wrong. Police find the picture of Mary and find out that Camera A took the picture. It is determined that Tom's credit card purchased camera A. Before questioning Tom, police first try to catalog all other pictures he's ever take and (could) perhaps cross reference it all with GPS data supplied by his cell phone.
Is this worrying, or do should I get a tin foil hat?
I understand and enjoy how technology allows US to do stuff we couldn't dream of before. I hate that the same technology lets THEM do what they've only ever dreamt of before.
The real power of such an application would be finding where elements have been added to the photograph. And unfortunately Adobe has made such a great product in Photoshop that blending edges of cropped in objects is pretty darn easy too. I do it all the time adding in blue skies to my pictures. The difficulty would be in getting shadows to line up the same and have the same intensity. Or detecting color balance inconsistencies where two images were mapped together starting with different levels of blue, for instance. Or maybe finding different JPG blockiness levels in different areas of a photograph.
But pretty much anything that software can attempt to detect, other software and careful editor diligence could defeat.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Yes, Adnan Hajj's unfortunate images were "doctored" as in "given too much medicine," the medicine being dust & scratch removal.
But it was not faked, nor was image content "cloned" with that tool.
This Image Is Not Faked
The next step, if someone was paying me for this, would be to try to replicate the disaster using some readily-available dust & scratch removal software, like Sane for the GIMP.
If Hajj's lawyer or Reuters were laying appropriate bucks at my feet, I would explore the problem through SciPy and PIL.
Hajj's disastrous image is an example of the kinds of errors we will have to get used to recognizing.
In the olden days, we would correct scratches by putting a drop of light mineral oil on the negative and putting glass over that. The oil filled in the scratches similar to the way the DCTs fill in the scratches nowadays.
Reuters deserved some reputation damage, as Hajj's photos aren't all that great and quite obviously Reuters's photo editor was asleep at the switch.
But accusing them of publishing faked photos is in this case fakery itself: pretending to knowledge that nobody has.
(Claimer: I was a photojournalist for various school organs for about a decade. I've done DSP professionally several times, and love doing it in my free time as well. If you count my PWM synth for the Apple ][, I've been doing DSP since 1979.)
Anyone that wants a glimpse of how industry & life worked in the USSR should check out the book Armageddon Averted by Stephen Kotkin.
He describes in that book how typewriters were more closely controlled in the USSR than assault weapons.
Another interesting--but totally unrelated tidbit--is that the factories were rewarded based on tonnage produced. So all the steel companies would only produce 1" thick steel plating. There was a dearth of thin steel sheeting.
So car companies would have to buy the thicker steel and mill it down to a workable thickness..
There's hundreds of anecdotes like that. It blew my mind.
Canadian war correspondent Scott Taylor (he is an ex army guy who runs a military mag called Esprit de Corps and was kidnapped in Iraq for over a week and lived.) once explained in a seminar how major news organizations stage their interventions for maximum pathos.
He talks about C.Amanpour. who made her career covering for the US administration in Bosnia, in Kosovo during our bombing raids which forced people to flee in all directions. She was in some camp where he was interviewing people and she was screaming at her cameraman that she didnt want video of men in the camp playing basketball in the background and that they had to find her sadder looking people for her report to work.
Taylor is a no-nonsense, no BS kind of guy and the stories he had about news organization manipulating events to fit the message they had to give were numerous.
The "hypocrite blog" ? Too funny.
Why don't you just call Charles Johnson a big fat poopy-head and thereby win any debate immediately?
Hi-larious. Now show me how the TANG forgeries were perpetrated by Karl Rove and evil Zionists (teh J0000z!!11one) just to make Dan Rather look bad even though they were actually real.
Furthermore, it should only require the feeding of a good battery of test and control images through the software with various types of manipulations (heck, for statistically reliable numbers it could even be automated) to essentially reverse-engineer Adobe's "authenticity" algorithms by experimentally determining what triggers the "suspect" flag.
I give it a few weeks at most, really.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Now what? The data will match perfectly yet what you see will have been doctored.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Editors will still have to do their jobs.
Either way, these measures will never regain the trust of some people.
Partisanship has cut too deeply these last few years.
Some people felt the truthiness of those pictures,
while others wouldn't have cared if they really happened.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Wow. You are saying that Reuters actually faked those blown up buildings? That must have taken a hell of a lot of work!
another fan of truthiness I take it.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
I second the call for your suicide. Make it a shotgun mouthwash, please.
Nikon has already had something like this for some time now.
I wish you were dead too.
if this is about a girl then please do it right. Make sure you blame her fist, then make sure you do it in front of her and blame her again, right before you pull the trigger.
Is an Air Force publication and falls under their rules and Air Force rules with regard to photo alteration. We crop; we adjust levels and curves; and we saturate between 10-15 percent to compensate for the color you lose when you transition from the digital image to paper. If security requires, we'll "black out" license plates, ID cards, etc., in such a way that it's clear we've altered the photo for security purposes. Anything else gets the image labeled as a photo illustration -- and the "anything else" has to be obvious to the viewer.
Even cropping, though, can fall into an ethical gray area depending on what you're cropping out of a picture. It's the same issue whether you crop in Photoshop or in the camera's frame of view, but in my experience, it's more "acceptable" to crop a picture with the camera than it would be to crop the same picture in Photoshop.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Obviously, you have a trust system like the others where you have to trust somebody.
Technology will get to the point where you can't detect the altered photo, sound, or video.
A digital photo of a crime can be submitted into court TODAY and never get expert review and eventually even the experts will get fooled.
Devices should sign their data, users can optionally remove it (because somebody will figure that out if its not easy.) Editors should be able to sign it as well, so if you trust the editor, you can trust the image.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I don't consider myself to be all that bright and I've already thought of about 50 ways to break this. You can always doctor an image and then recapture it with one of these new devices. For a newspaper or small internet photo, you could print out a high quality doctored image and simply take a picture of the printout. Furthermore, I'm sure someone will quickly create a software package to emulate the encryption process and sign the photo as if it was authentic.
If you look at most of the Reuters/AP fauxtography issues it boils down to lazy or partisan photogs and editors, not a lack of technology to verify the authenticity of the pictures.
Bad cloning, the same subjects being shot from different angles and then being used to portray different incidents, or in Times case (it might have been Newsweek originally) an editor taking the photogs own description and then changing it to try and make a accidental tire fire look like a downed Israeli jet. Just look at the Qana and especially the Al-Durah incidents, these were not technological problems but problems with bias reporters in the field (most agencies use local stringers which can owe allegiances to anyone). Anderson Cooper described the situation perfectly when talking about how Hezbollah would drive ambulances up and down the road while eager photographers snapped 'action' shots.
Nothing Adobe can put out will fix that mess.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Not convincing. You glossed over the upper left section of smoke, among other things. There was nothing there before hand, it was added, and the same pattern on the left side is obviously repeated. There are obvious buildings added in the editing photo that aren't there in the original. You point to a building at 2c and 2d in your file which is cloned to 3a and 3b. However, the one at 3a and 3b can be seen in the original, but was moved down to the lower section. More importantly, it's not at quite the same relative postion within your gridlines. Shifting down a bit, and over half as much is very plausible, and since it's not actually regular, your argument is completely unconvincing.
The whole lower half of the original appears to have been copied, sharpened, copied back in lower and to the left, and the smoke added in a vain attempt to cover it up, then cropped to hide the lower right corner which didn't have anything in it. The contrast was increased as well, which definitely makes for a more jarring image.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
and falls under their rules and Air Force rules
Should have been, "falls under DOD and Air Force rules ..." Shows what I get for not using "preview."
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Grandparent is full of shit. First of all, the replicated images are NOT AT THE SAME PLACE relative to the gridlines as the original. That totally negates all the bullshit about humans not editing in powers of two. Secondly, there's no way that dust/scratch removal would stretch the column of smoke upwards in the way it was done in the doctored image. An entire section of the image was displaced upwards, including a whole giant mess o' 16x16 areas. Explain to me what business scratch removal software has doing that?
Those stuffed toys are suspiciously clean.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
What is a forgery or a misleading photo? Any time light is passed through a lens, it is changed. Simply having a human photograph a person or event makes it an inherently biased happening. The goal of photojournalism is not to present an unbiased look at something, because that is impossible. The goal is to present an unprejudiced image that helps the reader/viewer/public-at-large understand something more completely.
As a photojournalist, I am held to the highest standard in terms of professional ethics. Sure, dust builds up on the camera's CCD/CMOS/JFET chip and must either be physically removed or 'cloned out' in Photoshop the same way dust/water spots were removed from negatives back in the dark room days.
Yes, we can, to a certain extent, modify the exposure of the image. Digital cameras (and film scanners) tend to give you an awfully flat photo and often require a slight darkening in the darker channels and a light pick-me-up in the light channels.
We frequently crop images either to fit them on the page (print still exists?) or improve the aesthetics of the shot.
The point here is, that 'processing' photos has not really changed. It's easier to manipulate a photo in Photoshop than in the darkroom, but lots of newsrooms have been digital for over 10 years now. The digital process is nothing new.
When pre-pressing a photo or getting it ready to send out to the agency, the key ethical point is not to materially change the meaning of the photo. That includes moving sports equipment around in the frame, darkening OJ's eyes to the point he looks like a crack addict or even moving the pyramids closer together for a cover shot (National Geographic).
There is not a single piece of software out there that can 'understand' a photo and know if it has been changed outside of the ethical policies of the profession. That's what editors are for. Human editors.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
To morons like you, it doesn't matter if is faked or not, it matters if it reinforces your beliefs.
Beliefs that are based on nothing more than what you want to think is true.
And it's funny that you should mention faked blown-up buildings. If you'd actually paid attention to the fauxtography that came out of Lebanon last summer, you'd know that at least one building was reported to have been destroyed three or four different times on three or four different dates.
And damn near all the photos Al-Reuters credulously published had that same damn woman in them.
But no, to sheltered retards like you, it's "truthy".
So actually, "faking" a few extra blown-up buildings only involved staging a few events, using the same actors over and over. So no, it didn't take much work at all. And to you, it's all real.
You dumbass. You stupid fucking dumbass.
I bet you think Dan Rather's memos were true, too. Hell, you probably even believe they were real.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. This image is faked to a degree that only an incompetent human being could fake. The technical minutiae of the particular method of fakery is beside the point - to my eyes it looks more like a pattern fill than a clone stamp (due to the regular repetition you note), but we could argue about that all day. The dead give-away that unscrupulous human beings are to blame are to be found at the edges of the doctored areas. No general-purpose algorithm is going to expand the cloud of smoke preferentially in one direction, and then suddenly terminate the billowing edge of the smoke cloud against a clear sky, because general-purpose image enhancement algorithms do not model the behaviour of billowing smoke clouds. No general-purpose algorithm is going to cut out whole buildings and transplant them perfectly to other parts of the neighbourhood, because general-purpose algorithms do not recognize where buildings start and end against a backdrop of other buildings. It takes a highly advanced image processing tool (namely a human being) to select meaningful subsections of an image (a particular building, a particlar part of a cloud) and reproduce it somewhere else in the image that makes sense to an intelligent viewer.
In other words, if a generic photoshop filter were to move buildings around the city, and enhance billowing smoke clouds in such a way as to enhance just the cloud without randomly chopping up other parts of the image, as was done in this image, then we could conclusively state that we have achieved artificial intelligence in commercial software. The fact that the result was lame is moot, because the necessary filters to clean up/smudge the lameness are dead easy, compared to the filters that made the initial image edits.
But the fact that a 10-year-old (or someone with equivalent aesthetics) could have made those photo edits in 10 minutes seems a somewhat more plausible explanation than the notion that we have HAL 9000 embedded in Photoshop.
That is kinda the point here. It's not a hezbullah headquarters that was bombed, it's obviously a day care center. At least that is what the AP/Reuters want you to believe.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
That was the point. The photos weren't from Zombie. They were from photographers/stringers over in the Middle East. In this case, I believe it was from Lebanon, during the recent war involving Hezbollah and Israel. Zombie inspected several of the more poignant images that came from the war and were posted on Reuters. She's (I believe it's a her) claiming shenannigans.
In case you don't understand (rather than making a rhetorical comment), the toys ARE suspiciously clean. Which, if it were in a builing that had been bombed to rubble... makes little sense. Along with the other toys and childrens' articles. That's one of Zombie's points, along with various other images she's deconstructed and replied on. She covers a bit of photo manipulation, but that's after a photo's been taken. There's ways to manipulate the scene prior to taking an image, and she goes after that.
Folks should read her report with an open mind.
You credulous fool
h otoshop-ive-ever-seen/
? tid=21302
This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop "clone" tool to add more smoke to the image. (Hat tip: Mike.)
It's so incredibly obvious, it reminds me of the faked CBS memos. Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There's really no question about it.
But it's not only the plumes of smoke that were "enhanced." There are also cloned buildings. (See below.)
The original image that was heavily modified is included in that post.
Here's some commentary on the photo about which you make a credulous claim that it wasn't altered:
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/08/05/the-worst-p
Here's a non-political photography site ripping you a new one:
http://www.sportsshooter.com/message_display.html
Some quotes from there:
"Nah... smoke naturally repeats itself in perfect patterns like that. It always does.....doesn't it?"
"If your going to ruined your career, at least work on the photo a little longer than two minutes."
This is slightly off topic, but it seemed like a good question to ask.
I ran into an unexpected hangup a few months back, when I needed to scan a few US dollar bills for use in a TV advertisement. The scanning program worked just fine, but when I opened it up in photoshop, it told me that the file contained counterfietable image data (or something to that extend), and wouldn't allow me to open the file. Does anyone know how and when Adobe started implementing a procedure that would check to see if paper money was being reproduced?
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Thank God! I've been waiting for this for ages.
Sometimes you can't tell if that's really Christina Aguilera, or just a fake. Now, we can rest assured, it's the real thing!
If slashdot can dupe stories why cant the real press?
I'm not trolling or trying to be funny but I think this will be a great tool for the so called UFOlogists who try to ascertain whether UFO pictures are faked or not.
Like I said, it's even got the same damn woman in it. And look who's name appears on the byline. Imagine that...
That caption clearly makes the attempt to imply the Israelis destroyed the building on August 5, 2006. Despite the FACT that's it's the exact same building that had photos published on July 18 and July 24.
You are a credulous idiot. But I doubt you're useful in any form.
The only way I could see a workable system in place for ensuring authenticity of a photo, would be to create a specialized database that all "certified" image editors will be required to contact at every point where it is launched, opens a file or saves to a file. The software in question would then upload a low-resolution snapshot of the image for every changed state to the original image that is saved. The image files themselves would then have to be encoded in such a way that they are linked to particular piece of software that created it, the machine it was created on and a reference within the database to verify the file is the same one that left the previous machine.
This means, of course, that all systems used for image editing would be required to have access to the internet in order to run, open a file or save changes.
The real scary part, is that such a system could also be used to spy on people, tracking their photographing habits, as well as who they are sharing the images with that would require such authentication.
8==8 Bones 8==8
(whereas the link you provide does not.)
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
And apparently you've never used a large clone brush with the source pointer overruning the modified result.
Here's a simple test. Set your clone brush to 100 pixels or so in size. Click the source point for cloning. Start cloning a 100 or so pixels away and drag the brush roughly inline with source point and clone brush centers. What happens? The pattern repeats itself at perfect intervals. Do this with a large, rectangular-shaped, hard-edge brush and you will get exactly the results in the doctored image.
You are correct that this is not an instance of a non-aligned clone process (i.e. clicking multiple points on the screen with the same clone source) in which it would introduce irregularities in the spacing. But the resulting image is quite evident of a clone brush "recloning" what it just did as it passed over the area it previously covered with the cloned area.
The excuse that this is an overzealous use of the dust/scratch removal is silly. If this guy were so concerned about the slight imperfection of dust on the orginial image, don't you think he'd notice that image had changed drastically after the application of this tool?
experience is a necessary but insufficient condition for expertise. Look at the second picture, also by your good friend Hajj: http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/
You know, the one with the cloned "missles" that were actually flares?
Oops.
He's done it before, you'd be blind not to think he did it again with this photo.
Sony ha
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,61890-0.html
No, The buildings were blown up just not repeatedly, It seems that some buildings are shown blown up say in july and then shown again as blown up in august. Some unlucky woman who had her home blown up repeatedly in several locations (talk about a neighbor from Hell). A 'Rescue worker' who appears in different places posing with the same dead corpse. The Staged Photo's of a childs toy looking new and setup to make the perfect shot with the rubble as backdrop. The rescue worker shown working within a bomb site later appearing as a dead body dragged from the rubble (later upgraded to injured not dead). Dummy wearing a weddingdress remarkably undamaged, next to a bomb site. (done in a few locations)
The blownup bridge that is two different bridges. The Red Cross ambulance with a hole blown exactly in the centre of the cross (or an old ambulance light assembly removed from the center of the cross).
The burning koran caught bursting into flames by a passing journalist hours after the original attack...
I accept the evidence that some photo's are staged but I don't know how I feel about that. Reality is there are real victims, real bombs. Should i feel cheated because these are not quite the genuine article, chances are the real victims have relatives that don't wish to see thier loved ones mangled bodies in the news.
Truth is we are being manipulated to draw our support for one point of view or another, perhaps it makes a difference when it comes to voting for our officials, but probably not.
Yes there is plenty of wrong in the world but as individuals we feel no responsibility and feel its not our problem least we can try to get along and see each other as human at least. It would be a start.
If Adobe release some kind of program to detect doctored images, I anticipate a new trend for artistically-minded geeks: reverse-Photoshopping. Instead of forum contests to produce realistic-looking fakes in Photoshop, people will be out with their cameras trying to capture unrealistic-looking originals in efforts to "beat" Adobe's tool and have it label a real photo 'doctored', purely to gain kudos from fellow photographers.
This, maybe more than anything, is what makes the smoke seem bigger, when really a lot of it was cropped out.In the correction image, the good one, there is one building which in the botch is at 2c,2d. At the place which is 3a,3b there is a lot of smoke obscuring more regular boring buildings. I very much suspect the regularity behind the smoke provided "hinting" to make the "echo" happen as bad as it did.
I have tried to keep from calling the second-to-be-published image the "original" as it probably wasn't. It is a correction image. I would truly, truly love to have the stuff right out of Hajj's camera and computer. Would solve everything in a real hurry!A tilde can mean "approximately" and that's what I meant when I said "~16 pixels apart, cutting the image into 16 nearly-equal bands." Same with the words "nearly-equal." Maybe I should expand the symbols into words to make them more visible.Give it a whirl if you think that's what happened.
And while you are committing psychology in public, perhaps you could explain why. Why take all that damn time to fake an image? A news photographer has ten pictures before and after that one. He's not hurting for content. He's hurting for time!
Dust and scratch removal is quite automated, and is even "on" by default in some products. It is part of the workflow. And so are bad lighting conditions which Hajj blames for having missed the awfulness of the bad image (laptop in the sun is my interpretation of bad lighting).
What motivation for taking all that time to copy a building here and there and then go put feathers in the smoke on regular 1/16th centers....
At least no UFOs were harmed in the construction of your conspiracy theory.
When you tag pixels as "bad" they are set to null and then you do the transform. Do the inverse transform and but go ahead and let the synthesis equations fill in the "bad" pixels. That's the process in a nutshell.
Marking pixels "bad" removes their contribution to the image. In the reconstruction the data has to come from elsewhere, it comes from the rest of the image through the inverse transform.
You're right, the algorithm certainly does not know "building."
But neither does my guitar digital delay box know "notes."
This algorithm "models" the behavior of the whole image, billows and all. The frequency domain representation *is* the model of the image. Which is why this algorithm looks so damn good when done right: the interpolated values are very true to what should be there.
I tested this by using bogus defect channels and compare (subtract) the reconstruction with the original. Usually the difference was well below the resolution of 16-bit ints and always indistinguishable to human eyes. Then when you ask too much of the algorith you get a disaster like the image we are discussing.
The widespread feathering is a common artifact of this kind of image processing. There are even knobs to deal with it on some GUIs (like this free-to-download implementation from Polaroid (IIRC).
We don't know how much user input went into making Hajj's defect channel. If he designated a block of Beirut as bad pixels, the algorithm would have to interpolate that whole block. IOW, the "selectivity" you attribute to the algorithm may well be the selectivity of the operator one Adnan Hajj.
And to address your other pole, the algorithm did randomly chop up other parts of the image: the aforementioned feathering. It went on a pogrom against large populations of gray (algorithmically these are close to null) all over the image.
Look at ANY buildings at the bottom of the altered picture. You can find the same buildings up and to the right in the original (the building in 9e and 9f in your grid is a handy one to track). Some of them show up twice in the edited one, although not many. However, the building with the pointed roof in the top left section of the pictures has not been moved in either image. The relative position between that building and ALL of the buildings in the lower third has changed. This is why I thought it looked as if some section of the picture had been copied and pasted back in lower and to the left of it's original. Given what I just noticed about the skyline, I think the copy and paste job was a little more arbitrary than I originally believed.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Maybe now we'll finally see an end to those photoshopped nude photos of celebrities.
"The following nude photos of Neve Campbell are VERIFIED REAL by Adobe!"
suh-weeet!
Staged Photo opportunities were reported by Anderson Cooper so it isn't a giant right-wing conspiracy to discredit the media reports that came from Lebanon. The fact is media manipulation is a major part of Hezbollah's arsenal. This doesn't mean that Israel should be immune from scrutiny regarding its actions in Lebanon, simply that the media reports that came from Lebanon should be scrutinized as well.
I find it interesting that in a free and open society the media isn't immune from a level of control. The difference between a free society and a closed, controlling society is who actually exercises that control. In truth the media should be self-managing, able to portray an objective view for interpretation by the world. This self-management should be similar to how scientific disciplines avoid the bias of predefined assumptions by the use of peer reviews and the scientific process. If journalism is ever to come close to the level of accuracy displayed in our scientific communities, it needs better controls and more objectivity (Referring to all News outlets, including the New York Times and Fox News).
One of the problems with today's journalists is that they are not scientists but artists. News is given to the masses after it has been modified to either make it aesthetically pleasing or shockingly dramatic. It is entertainment, and as such it will always be subject to the biased world view of the artist. Another related problem with today's journalism can be best portrayed by the telephone game. Given that a story is often passed through multiple sources before it becomes available to the masses, it becomes subject to the biases of every link in that chain. Often times a reporter may receive footage that has come through so many links that the original source is no longer known. Lebanon was the perfect example of that, as major media outlets displayed footage that was found to come from staged scenes.
News that is scientifically presented may be termed by some to be simply boring. However, it would be just about as boring as lectures on physics, which some find to be quite fascinating. I get the feeling we're going in the right direction with our media's self-controls, even if those self-controls are the by-product of an ideological war (Left vs. Right, we expose your fake photos, you expose ours). We're still a long way off though, so anything we can do to further scrutinize the news is simply a step in the right direction.