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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.
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 You'll find that your cultures, mores, traditions, rituals, and sensibilities are woefully outdated.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
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
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.
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.