Schwippy

Fake Photo Detection Software

April 5, 2007 on 12:48 pm | In news, security, tech, photography, software |

When journalists are writing for a newspaper, they know the rule: no digital photo manipulation. In other words, no using that beloved stamp tool in Photoshop to take out that pedestrian that ruined your perfect shot of the president.

But sometimes, the temptation is just too much for the reporter and they decide they have enough Photoshop experience and talent to get away with changing some elements in their shot.

This is becoming such a problem, that the Associated Press actually has a third party help them out with it. They contract the help of Hany Farid. Hany has made special software that analyzes photos to determine if it is genuine or not automatically. The software looks for certain red flags about the photo that the normal eye just wouldn’t catch without a magnifying glass. Things like repeating pixels patterns, or unnatural shadows, pixel patterns due to rescaling, and especially the pupil reflections of multiple people in the shot.

It make sense when ya think about it. What is reflected in one person’s pupil should also be reflected in another person’s, to an extent.

Forgery has been around ever since… well…. authenticity. Theres no way to eliminate it. But even so, things need to be done.

“This is an arms race,” Farid says. “I can already tell you how it’s going to end: We’re going to lose. It’s always going to be easier to create a forgery than detect a forgery. But we’re going to take the power to create forgeries out of the hands of amateurs. We will raise that bar up until you have to be very, very good to do it.”

Computing Photographic Forgeries [Via Boing Boing]