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.

Comments

Staged Photographs

[Detritus]

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.

Re:Staged Photographs

[TheCodeFoundry]

Which photographs?

I would start with this:
http://rayrobison.typepad.com/ray_robison/2006/08/ al_ap_at_it_aga.html/
and
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=2211 6_Still_More_Photo_Staging_Identified&only/

Then you can read about the Red Cross Ambulance Incident here:
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/

Additional staged incidents here:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=2212 3_Green_Helmet_Admits_Staging_Photos&only/

Re:Staged Photographs

[c_forq]

Back in the US invasion of Cuba good old Teddy Roosevelt had bodies moved from one battle front to the one his Rough Riders were on for photographic purposes. There are also incidents of a famous civil war photographer having multiple pictures of the same corpse in different poses in multiple locations. This isn't anything new and it will probably never go away as long as photography is an effective medium of communication.

Re:Staged Photographs

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: LGF -- they do screw up occaisionally but they also admit it when they have screwed up and publish the appropriate retraction. In terms of accuracy, it's a decent source for news, but you can't cherry pick articles from it no more then grabbing a single newspaper off the shelf of an archive would have you miss the correction to the story published next week.

On the other hand if you don't like the fact that it's a politically conservative site about the current state of the world and documenting people set on fire in the name of Islam, that's fine too. But don't say it's inaccurate, merely that you disagree.

As far as the photos are concerned, I don't think it's open to debate. The facts are that the photos were published and presented to the reader as accurate representations when they really depicted staged and altered scenes.

Uhhh, perhaps some non-biased humans are needed to

[SengirV]

How is Adobe going to find other faked war photos like these?

http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/r1891896 384.jpg
http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/r3577351 291.jpg

or the woman who shows up to cry over every and all bombed buildings in Reuters' world

http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/beirutwo man2.jpg

Source - http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/

Re:You know what would be cool...

[Joe Decker]

Canon's DSLRs do checksum the data, there's a verification tool as well. Of course that only works with the original uncropped data, but it does give you a fairly firm reference to which you can compare any derivative versions.

Re:Matching images to cameras

[Joe Decker]

Too late, It's already done. The Exif information from the cameras I use already includes the camera serial number. (Not that I'm disagreeing with your point.)

Re:Matching images to cameras

[bustersnyvel]

Too late, It's already done. The Exif information from the cameras I use already includes the camera serial number. (Not that I'm disagreeing with your point.)

Of course, EXIF contains a lot of information about your camera. However, the data is digital, and can thus be edited. You are free to remove any identifying data from the EXIF headers before you publish your images.

Re:Doctoring? Yes.

[phlinn]

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.

Re:Doctoring? Yes.

[Radon360]

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?