DVPhoto

Wired has an article up about how adobe plans to tackle photo forgeries. The tools they are working on? A clone stamp detection tool, a tool that will determine the camera used to take an image, and most interestingly, a tool that will check if a photo has been changed at all. This final tool manages this due to the demosaicing that bayer array cameras have to do when processing the image. Apparently this causes a colour relationship between neighbouring pixels that will most likely be destroyed when the photo is edited in Photoshop.

Since all these tools will use statistical methods to determine the authenticity of a photo, there will always be a number of false positives. Adobe are aware that this is a problem, and are going to continue working on the tools for the next 1 to 3 years before releasing them to the world, in an attempt to minimise the percentage of errors. Still no matter how good the tool are, it is likely they will return false positives now and again, so I hope the editors realise this and don’t just automatically assume the photographer is dishonest when the tools say so.

Tags: Software