Review on passive approaches for detecting image tampering

This paper defines the presently used methods and approaches in the domain of digital image forgery detection. A survey of a recent study is explored including an examination of the current techniques and passive approaches in detecting image tampering. This area of research is relatively new and only a few sources exist that directly relate to the detection of image forgeries. Passive, or blind, approaches for detecting image tampering are regarded as a new direction of research. In recent years, there has been significant work performed in this highly active area of research. Passive approaches do not depend on hidden data to detect image forgeries, but only utilize the statistics and/or content of the image in question to verify its genuineness. The specific types of forgery detection techniques are discussed below

Explaining and trusting expert evidence: What is a ‘sufficiently reliable scientific basis’?

Through a series of judicial decisions and Practice Directions, the English courts have developed a rule that expert evidence must have ‘a sufficiently reliable scientific basis to be admitted’. There is a dearth of case-law as to what degree of reliability is ‘sufficient’. This article argues that the test should be interpreted as analogous to one developed in the law of hearsay: expert evidence (scientific or otherwise) must be ‘potentially safely reliable’ in the context of the evidence as a whole. The implications of this test will vary according to the relationship between the expert evidence and the other evidence in the case. The article identifies three main patterns into which this relationship falls. Whether the jury relies upon the evidence will depend upon what they regard as the best explanation of the evidence and how far they trust the expert. Whether their reliance is safe (as a basis for conviction) depends on whether they could rationally rule out explanations consistent with innocence, and whether the degree to which they take the expert’s evidence on trust is consistent with prosecution’s burden of proving the essential elements of its case, including the reliability of any scientific techniques on which it relies

Cultural Heritage conservation and communication by digital modeling tools. Case studies: minor architecture of the Thirties in the Turin area

Between the end of the twenties and the beginning of the World war two Turin, as the most of the Italian cities, was endowed by the fascist regime of many new buildings to guarantee its visibility and to control the territory: the fascist party main houses and the local ones. The style that was adopted for these constructions was inspired by the guide lines of the Modern movement which were spreading by a generation of architects as Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mendelsohn. At the end of the war many buildings were reconverted to several functions that led heavy transformations not respectful of the original worth, other were demolished. Today it's possible to rebuild those lost architectures in their primal format as it was created by their architects on paper (and in their mind). This process can guarantee the three-dimensional perception, the authenticity of the materials and the placement into the Turin urban tissue, using static and dynamic digital representation systems. The “three-dimensional re-drawing” of the projects, thought as an heuristic practice devoted to reveal the original idea of the project, inserts itself in a digital model of the urban and natural context as we can live it today, to simulate the perceptive effects that the building could stir up today. The modeling skills are the basis to product videos able to explore the relationship between the environment and “re-built architectures”, describing with the synthetic movie techniques, the main formal and perceptive roots. The model represents a scientific product that can be involved in a virtual archive of cultural goods to preserve the collective memory of the architectural and urban past image of Turin

Forensic Analysis of Digital Image Tampering

The use of digital photography has increased over the past few years, a trend which opens the door for new and creative ways to forge images. The manipulation of images through forgery influences the perception an observer has of the depicted scene, potentially resulting in ill consequences if created with malicious intentions. This poses a need to verify the authenticity of images originating from unknown sources in absence of any prior digital watermarking or authentication technique. This research explores the holes left by existing research; specifically, the ability to detect image forgeries created using multiple image sources and specialized methods tailored to the popular JPEG image format. In an effort to meet these goals, this thesis presents four methods to detect image tampering based on fundamental image attributes common to any forgery. These include discrepancies in 1) lighting and 2) brightness levels, 3) underlying edge inconsistencies, and 4) anomalies in JPEG compression blocks. Overall, these methods proved encouraging in detecting image forgeries with an observed accuracy of 60% in a completely blind experiment containing a mixture of 15 authentic and forged images

Pathos and Patina: The Failure and Promise of Constitutionalism in the European Imagination

Legal studies react to the Union’s social legitimacy deficit either by funneling the problem into empirical sociology (accompanied by the familiar call for more transparency and democracy), or by ignoring it altogether. This article argues that the crisis in social acceptance can be traced back to the texture of EU law. Law is more than a body of rules: It is a social practice, a structure of meaning, and a system of beliefs. In this light, national law has a richly textured cushion of cultural resources to rely on, which makes it ours. In contrast, EU law embodies the fluid surface of consumer identity and appears less ours. The Union’s counter-measures – adding pathos and patina to neutralize our distrust – have proven unsuccessful. The way out, then, is coming to terms with the market citizen, rather than believing in, and forcing upon the consumer, stories of shared values and historically situated commonality.legitimacy; European law; constitution building; polity building; identity

Redefinitions of Selfhood: Stan Brakhage, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg as Thoreauvian Counterculturists

My master’s thesis lies in examining the appropriation of Henry David Thoreau’s techniques of authorship within the American 1960’s counterculture. My investigation focuses on how Stan Brakhage, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg engage in Thoreauvian forms of selfhood, self-government, citizenship, and ecological awareness within the context of the 1960’s counterculture. These three artists take on issues of 20th century materialism, nationalism, sexuality, and racial equality, within their respective medium of expression, as participants in what I will define as “Thoreauvian tradition”. Elements of this “Thoreauvian tradition” include subjective vision, ontological identity, undermining myth, and evolving the medium. These are the sub textual components through which Thoreau’s writings become more blatantly associated to passive resistance, political and educational demonstration, and oral and written social reform

The Failure of the Surveillance State: Observation, Narrative and Identity in American Literature and Culture Since the Cold War

This dissertation examines an aporia in Michel Foucault\u27s analysis of ideological panopticism. Foucault would likely suggest that the contemporary widespread use and acceptance of second-generation surveillance technologies exemplifies the discursive circulation of panoptic ideology. To the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence that suggests that such technology can be used for, to borrow Steve Mann\u27s phrase, sousveillance (or, literally, to watch from below ). By drawing from Niklas Luhmann\u27s and Gregory Bateson\u27s examinations of the inherent blind spots of observation systems (both literal and metaphorical), this dissertation suggests that sousveillance posits a challenge to the theoretically neat (according to Foucault) ideological function of surveillance. Moreover, this dissertation draws from Chilean biologists and systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela\u27s concept of autopoiesis, or self-creation, in order to examine how the second-generation surveillance camera facilitates opportunities to discursively express and forge identities that are not so neatly explained by the limited possibilities of ideological interpellation.;This project approaches these issues by examining a triangulated, discursive relationship between surveillance, narrative, and subjectivity as it manifests in contemporary American culture, and it locates examples of this triangulated relationship in both the form and content of various postmodern, cultural products such as Don DeLillo\u27s novel Cosmopolis, Anna Deavere Smith\u27s stage play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Hasan Elahi\u27s digital art installation Tracking Transience, and David Simon\u27s HBO series The Wire. The Failure of the Surveillance State ultimately posits that panoptic power does not function as neatly as Foucault proposed and that the failures and blind spots of contemporary surveillance systems provide significant possibilities for reconsidering and reconstructing theoretical models of subjectivity, agency, and narrative. It concludes by asserting that these failures have become embedded in emerging narrative frameworks that have moved away from the authority of a singular narrator to a practice that mirrors an infinite regress of secondary observers in multiple points-of-view narrative frameworks (as in the case of Jennifer Egan\u27s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad)

Nothing Matters: Answering the Question ‘Where’s the Art?’ through Ma and Gen

This research explores the ontology of Gen, or the being of a ‘non-being’, through an examination into the Japanese concept of Ma. Ma is a Japanese word and concept whose English equivalent does not exist but is usually translated as the ‘conscious void/interval’, while Gen (variants: Jen/Zjen/Xen/Zen) describes the experience of becoming such an interval. Using conceptual art as the core method of investigation and cultural pluralism as its philosophical framework, the practice was documented as a series of essays on relevant ideas, beginning with the absolute, aestheticism, authenticity, authorship, and autonomy. The paper builds on the current research on the manifestation and function of Ma by introducing relevant and necessary terms into the discourse, including: Gen, Mu, Ba, Ta, Self/Culture, cognitive (dis)equilibrium, conceptual tipping-point, ontological comfort trap, and self-obliteration. As the concept of Ma has often been associated with ascetic reduction, manifested as simplicity and silence, the paper begins with a study into the use of nothingness and the void in minimalist artworks. It also builds on my MA research and Sachiyo Goda’s study into the intercultural understanding of Ma as an intersubjective phenomenon, by introducing a new concept, Gen, which leads to an enquiry into what it means to become a Ma, a nonbeing. In contrast to the minimalist approach, the study will show that such state of emptiness can be achieved through an alternate method of ‘production’ (as opposed to re-duction) by using an authentically embodied methodology of ‘becoming’ the observed, rather than through mere documentation or representation of the phenomena. The study yields insights of potential interest to artists, philosophers, social theorists, empirical researchers, and indeed any English reader. The paper forms practical and theoretical contributions to the debates on the nature of art by: - enhancing our knowledge of Ma and its function in contemporary art; - introducing such explicitly implicit ontology as Gen; - extending our knowledge of the complex nature of Ma through an investigation into Gen; - offering a new strategy i.e. self-obliteration, in discerning such notions as an alternate to the minimalistic ascetic reduction method; - developing the language of such notions, contextualizing and bridging the Western and Eastern understanding and use of such ontology; - offering a new understanding of research with its interdisciplinary mode of practice and through a multidisciplinary body of work presented in and beyond the exhibition space, shifting away from the cerebral mode of comprehension by drawing out a primarily experiential conception of the relationship between art and Gen