Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries 158
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 (Score:1, Troll)
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The dumbest students in any university are in the School of Education. The second-dumbest and the most opinionated go into the School of Journalism. Those of us in enginee
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Al-Reuters?
Puhlease.
You're either a radical Zionist zealot or an LGFer.
Spare us your paranoia.
The pictures speak for themselves. [zombietime.com] One need not be on the side of Zionism to see that Hezbollah plays a pretty good game of propaganda. I particularly like the ubiquity of Green Helmet Guy, the apparent Hezbollah media director.
Face it, all those assholes in that part of the world who are at each others throats are same. It's political shitheads like that on both sides that make life unpleasent for normal folks.
Linky (Score:2, Informative)
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Why not... (Score:4, Funny)
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Warning! Your "Cancel or Allow" prompt may have been altered: "Cancel or Allow"?
*Clicks "Allow"*
You have lost your network connection
You have connected a USB device
Warning! Your "Cancel or Allow" prompt may have been altered: "Cancel or Allow"?
You have joined a network
You seem to be writing a letter, want me to help?
Someone just walked past your house
*Clicks "Allow"*
Warning! Your "Cancel or Allow" prompt may have been altered: "Cancel or Allow"?
In a forest 3400 miles away, a tree
Matching images to cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was stunned... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Matching images to cameras (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Funny)
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Trusted Photography to provide due diligence? (Score:2)
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i acknowledge the problem of modified photos, but i can't think of a solution to this... i mean, drm-like solutions will fail (i hope we don't have to repeat why
then there's a possible software that tests for image details that might be altered - but that's an uphill battle as it would be just a matter of re-running this software until all the supicious places are worked out.
so is there a way to actually detect that image is authentic ?
maybe only by dec
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Regardless, EXIF is easily edited and tells us little to nothing about the original image's authenticity.
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Here's a list of printers that do this:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/printers/list.php [eff.org]
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Staged Photographs (Score:5, Informative)
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Many of the photographs from Qana were staged.
Re:Staged Photographs (Score:5, Informative)
I would start with this:
http://rayrobison.typepad.com/ray_robison/2006/08
and
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=221
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=221
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Re:Staged Photographs (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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It's easy to be a member of the reality based community when you get to pick and choose your reality.
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Re:Staged Photographs (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like CNN? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 scream
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These days, 99.99% of the reporting is drowning in spin from some side or other because reporters now feel like they have to convey "truthiness" and "perspective" (or their version of it) rather than just hard
Bad Control (Score:3, Insightful)
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Forgeries? (Score:3, Funny)
It begins (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I agree, but Reuters and the AP aren't trying to stop l33t haxxors, they're trying to stop journalists.
A serious part of the problem with the status quo is that there are no controls.
The technology may have all the effectiveness of security theater, or it may be as effective as Sarbanes-Oxley. Either way, once it is in place the parent corporation will pass blame to the jo
Easy to break with a little science (Score:1)
I give it a few weeks at most, really.
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The solution (Score:5, Funny)
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.
It could probably be done with Jpeg (Score:2)
Of course i can doctor my photo, print it and then rephotograph it. Damn analog hole.
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Recording the lens used with the camera and an estimate of the focus distance (which Canon already does in their DSLRs, although not all of their lenses return distance information yet), and then using that as part of any cryptographic hash data verification would give you a little more protection.
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I hereby request that slashdot be shut down under DMCA, and the Trusted Infrastructure Patented Algorithm Protection Act.
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Not really, TII images will be downsampled, or possibly replaced with clip art of a terrorist if you print them. Unless you have a TII compliant printer of course, then they'll have a watermark which will cause scanners to request a license for editing from the TII key repository and replace them with clipart of a terrorist if one can't be found due to network problems. TII researchers are working on Goedel sequences in wat
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is all this really necessary? (Score:1)
Re:is all this really necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
Let me take a guess (Score:5, Interesting)
You know what would be cool... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You know what would be cool... (Score:4, Informative)
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Take a picture of a picture. (Score:2)
Uhhh, perhaps some non-biased humans are needed to (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [zombietime.com]
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Editors will still have to do their jobs.
Either way, these measures will never regain the trust of some people.
Partisanship has cut too deeply these last few years.
Some people felt the truthiness of those pictures,
while others wouldn't have cared if they really happened.
Re:Uhhh, perhaps some non-biased humans are needed (Score:2)
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Anti-photoshop? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yup, they'll annihilate each other in a shower of hard gamma photons.
Its a trust system (Score:2)
Technology will get to the point where you can't detect the altered photo, sound, or video.
A digital photo of a crime can be submitted into court TODAY and never get expert review and eventually even the experts will get fooled.
Devices should sign their data, users can optionally remove it (because somebody will figure that out if its not easy.) Editors should be able to sign it as well, so if you trust the editor, you can t
There's nothing new here at all... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
balance... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I'd say things are just nicely balancing out.
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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.
Ask for a refund for your tinfoil hat. I think it is broken.
Photo manipulation has been around since the beginning of photography. Proving a photograph has been diddled with can be quite difficult.
So now you say AP and Reuters work for the "other side". That "stringers" are in the employ of terrorists and criminals. Proof? Sources? Or is it that you don't like to see photographs critical of our policies and actions here and abroad?
I mean, that's what photojournalism is for -- to show Joe and Jane Six
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well (Score:4, Interesting)
Same problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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Here [loc.gov] is an original scan of a negative from the FSA photo project, a Jack Delano shot.
Here [loc.gov] is the scan of the print.
Obviously we aren't talking about some massive fakery here, no people have been edited in or out, no machine gun nets have been added. But the print is definitely different from the negative. what if this were done with smoke coming from a building, or bloo
WAIT (Score:2)
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 Ca
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Only good for poor work (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Doctoring? Yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
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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 th
Re:Doctoring? Yes. (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Proof that.. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Our paper ... (Score:2)
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 els
Dammit. (Score:2)
and falls under their rules and Air Force rules
Should have been, "falls under DOD and Air Force rules ..." Shows what I get for not using "preview."
Money... (Score:2)
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 mone
Started in CS...here's how to get around it. (Score:2)
UFOlogy (Score:2)
Image Editors That Phone Home? (Score:2)
Prediction (Score:2)
Sweet! (Score:2)
"The following nude photos of Neve Campbell are VERIFIED REAL by Adobe!"
suh-weeet!