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

Why not...

[brian.gunderson]

Warning : The photo you are trying to open may have been altered. Allow / Cancel?

Matching images to cameras

[AmIAnAi]

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.

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:Matching images to cameras

[JazzLad]

Yeah, we're gonna be in REAL trouble when they learn to embed cameras' serial numbers in a digital photo non-digitally ... for one thing, they'll be a ***** to transport ;)

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.

Bad Control

[bdrees]

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.

Forgeries?

[Grashnak]

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?

It begins

[inviolet]

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.

The solution

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Let me take a guess

[Hoi Polloi]

Will it involve digital micro dots?

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/

Anti-photoshop?

[Big Nothing]

So now they're making both Photoshop and Anti-Photoshop? Whon't those two take out each other? Like pasta and anti-pasta?

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:is all this really necessary?

[Yoozer]

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?

As feasible as glued-shut DVD players and self-destructing iPods with a removed clickwheel. Whatever you can see or hear, you can duplicate; whatever shows up on the screen or goes through an output can be captured.

One thing you won't see mentioned here

[Illbay]

These forgeries have become the stock-in-trade of the "stringers" used by "venerable" news agencies such as Reuters and AP. Many of these stringers are in fact confederates of terrorists and criminals, and their work is part of the disinformation campaign that is part of the GWOT.

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.

well

[mastershake_phd]

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.

Same problem

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Doctoring? Yes.

[toddhisattva]

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.)

I was stunned...

[encoderer]

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.

You mean like CNN?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?