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 You'll find that your cultures, mores, traditions, rituals, and sensibilities are woefully outdated.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