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

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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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: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.