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.

garbage in garbage out

how are you going to detect forgeries when there is an editorial decision to use a forgery to present biased news (see al-ruters) ? shouldnt this be something the general public should hae to put a check on the mainstream media.

Linky

PDF is boring. HTML is awesome. Here's the work of Hany Faid [72.14.253.104] in HTML, courtesy of Google.

Why not...

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

Matching images to cameras

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.

I was stunned...

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.

Re:Matching images to cameras

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

Re:Matching images to cameras

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

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

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

Which photographs?

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

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

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

Re:Staged Photographs

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.

Re:Staged Photographs

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.

Bad Control

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?

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

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

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.

is all this really necessary?

With as much wireless technology as there is at our disposal, wouldn't it be possible to create a program that would automatically generate authenticity verification files as soon as a camera was hooked up to the computer (and sent to a server)? 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?

Re:is all this really necessary?

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.

Let me take a guess

Will it involve digital micro dots [pffc-online.com]?

You know what would be cool...

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.

Re:You know what would be cool...

Canon's DSLRs do checksum the data, there's a verification tool [dpreview.com] 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.

Uhhh, perhaps some non-biased humans are needed to

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

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

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 [zombietime.com]

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

Anti-photoshop?

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

There's nothing new here at all...

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/fridrich/publications .html [binghamton.edu]

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.

One thing you won't see mentioned here

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

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

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.

WAIT

A suite of photo-authentication tools under development by Adobe Systems could make it possible to match a digital photo to the camera that shot it, and to detect some improper manipulation of images, Wired News has learned.

Am I the only one that found this sentence in the introduction more than a little scary?

Say, Tom takes a picture of his friend Mary and posts it online. Some time later, they cease being friends, and Mary does something terribly wrong. Police find the picture of Mary and find out that Camera A took the picture. It is determined that Tom's credit card purchased camera A. Before questioning Tom, police first try to catalog all other pictures he's ever take and (could) perhaps cross reference it all with GPS data supplied by his cell phone.

Is this worrying, or do should I get a tin foil hat?

I understand and enjoy how technology allows US to do stuff we couldn't dream of before. I hate that the same technology lets THEM do what they've only ever dreamt of before.

Only good for poor work

Using their example image ...

The clone stamp detection tool highlights areas of the image where there is improbable sameness, revealing the cloned section and its origin. The very small area highlighted in the clouds are the sameness/pattern created by nature.

You'll only get "sameness" if you're using the clone stamp at or near 100% opacity. I use about 20% opacity and clone stamp from multiple locations to avoid visible "sameness". This technique overlaps multiple patterns at various strengths to create a new unique pattern. Anyone who's any good at photo-manipulation would do at least the same thing.

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.

Doctoring? Yes.

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 [rr.com]

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 [rick.free.fr] 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.)

Re:Doctoring? Yes.

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.

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?

Nikon already has this

Nikon has already had something like this [nikonimaging.com] for some time now.

Our paper ...

Is an Air Force publication and falls under their rules and Air Force rules with regard to photo alteration. We crop; we adjust levels and curves; and we saturate between 10-15 percent to compensate for the color you lose when you transition from the digital image to paper. If security requires, we'll "black out" license plates, ID cards, etc., in such a way that it's clear we've altered the photo for security purposes. Anything else gets the image labeled as a photo illustration -- and the "anything else" has to be obvious to the viewer.

Even cropping, though, can fall into an ethical gray area depending on what you're cropping out of a picture. It's the same issue whether you crop in Photoshop or in the camera's frame of view, but in my experience, it's more "acceptable" to crop a picture with the camera than it would be to crop the same picture in Photoshop.

Policy not technology is the answer

If you look at most of the Reuters/AP fauxtography issues it boils down to lazy or partisan photogs and editors, not a lack of technology to verify the authenticity of the pictures.

Bad cloning, the same subjects being shot from different angles and then being used to portray different incidents, or in Times case (it might have been Newsweek originally) an editor taking the photogs own description and then changing it to try and make a accidental tire fire look like a downed Israeli jet. Just look at the Qana and especially the Al-Durah [wikipedia.org] incidents, these were not technological problems but problems with bias reporters in the field (most agencies use local stringers which can owe allegiances to anyone). Anderson Cooper described the situation perfectly when talking about how Hezbollah would drive ambulances up and down the road while eager photographers snapped 'action' shots.

Nothing Adobe can put out will fix that mess.

Working Photojournalist here

What is a forgery or a misleading photo? Any time light is passed through a lens, it is changed. Simply having a human photograph a person or event makes it an inherently biased happening. The goal of photojournalism is not to present an unbiased look at something, because that is impossible. The goal is to present an unprejudiced image that helps the reader/viewer/public-at-large understand something more completely.

As a photojournalist, I am held to the highest standard in terms of professional ethics. Sure, dust builds up on the camera's CCD/CMOS/JFET chip and must either be physically removed or 'cloned out' in Photoshop the same way dust/water spots were removed from negatives back in the dark room days.

Yes, we can, to a certain extent, modify the exposure of the image. Digital cameras (and film scanners) tend to give you an awfully flat photo and often require a slight darkening in the darker channels and a light pick-me-up in the light channels.

We frequently crop images either to fit them on the page (print still exists?) or improve the aesthetics of the shot.

The point here is, that 'processing' photos has not really changed. It's easier to manipulate a photo in Photoshop than in the darkroom, but lots of newsrooms have been digital for over 10 years now. The digital process is nothing new.

When pre-pressing a photo or getting it ready to send out to the agency, the key ethical point is not to materially change the meaning of the photo. That includes moving sports equipment around in the frame, darkening OJ's eyes to the point he looks like a crack addict or even moving the pyramids closer together for a cover shot (National Geographic).

There is not a single piece of software out there that can 'understand' a photo and know if it has been changed outside of the ethical policies of the profession. That's what editors are for. Human editors.

Money...

This is slightly off topic, but it seemed like a good question to ask.

I ran into an unexpected hangup a few months back, when I needed to scan a few US dollar bills for use in a TV advertisement. The scanning program worked just fine, but when I opened it up in photoshop, it told me that the file contained counterfietable image data (or something to that extend), and wouldn't allow me to open the file. Does anyone know how and when Adobe started implementing a procedure that would check to see if paper money was being reproduced?

Finally, no more fakes!

Thank God! I've been waiting for this for ages.

Sometimes you can't tell if that's really Christina Aguilera, or just a fake. Now, we can rest assured, it's the real thing!

UFOlogy

I'm not trolling or trying to be funny but I think this will be a great tool for the so called UFOlogists who try to ascertain whether UFO pictures are faked or not.

Image Editors That Phone Home?

The only way I could see a workable system in place for ensuring authenticity of a photo, would be to create a specialized database that all "certified" image editors will be required to contact at every point where it is launched, opens a file or saves to a file. The software in question would then upload a low-resolution snapshot of the image for every changed state to the original image that is saved. The image files themselves would then have to be encoded in such a way that they are linked to particular piece of software that created it, the machine it was created on and a reference within the database to verify the file is the same one that left the previous machine.

This means, of course, that all systems used for image editing would be required to have access to the internet in order to run, open a file or save changes.

The real scary part, is that such a system could also be used to spy on people, tracking their photographing habits, as well as who they are sharing the images with that would require such authentication.

Prediction

If Adobe release some kind of program to detect doctored images, I anticipate a new trend for artistically-minded geeks: reverse-Photoshopping. Instead of forum contests to produce realistic-looking fakes in Photoshop, people will be out with their cameras trying to capture unrealistic-looking originals in efforts to "beat" Adobe's tool and have it label a real photo 'doctored', purely to gain kudos from fellow photographers.

Sweet!

Maybe now we'll finally see an end to those photoshopped nude photos of celebrities.

"The following nude photos of Neve Campbell are VERIFIED REAL by Adobe!"

suh-weeet!