Video copy-move forgery detection scheme based on displacement paths

Sophisticated digital video editing tools has made it easier to tamper real videos and create perceptually indistinguishable fake ones. Even worse, some post-processing effects, which include object insertion and deletion in order to mimic or hide a specific event in the video frames, are also prevalent. Many attempts have been made to detect such as video copy-move forgery to date; however, the accuracy rates are still inadequate and rooms for improvement are wide-open and its effectiveness is confined to the detection of frame tampering and not localization of the tampered regions. Thus, a new detection scheme was developed to detect forgery and improve accuracy. The scheme involves seven main steps. First, it converts the red, green and blue (RGB) video into greyscale frames and treats them as images. Second, it partitions each frame into non-overlapping blocks of sized 8x8 pixels each. Third, for each two successive frames (S2F), it tracks every block’s duplicate using the proposed two-tier detection technique involving Diamond search and Slantlet transform to locate the duplicated blocks. Fourth, for each pair of the duplicated blocks of the S2F, it calculates a displacement using optical flow concept. Fifth, based on the displacement values and empirically calculated threshold, the scheme detects existence of any deleted objects found in the frames. Once completed, it then extracts the moving object using the same threshold-based approach. Sixth, a frame-by-frame displacement tracking is performed to trace the object movement and find a displacement path of the moving object. The process is repeated for another group of frames to find the next displacement path of the second moving object until all the frames are exhausted. Finally, the displacement paths are compared between each other using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) matching algorithm to detect the cloning object. If any pair of the displacement paths are perfectly matched then a clone is found. To validate the process, a series of experiments based on datasets from Surrey University Library for Forensic Analysis (SULFA) and Video Tampering Dataset (VTD) were performed to gauge the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results of the detection scheme were very encouraging with an accuracy rate of 96.86%, which markedly outperformed the state-of-the-art methods by as much as 3.14%

Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller

The film-book The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller is based on the documentary film of the same name made in 2010. The political, academic and environmental contexts surrounding this film since its release prove with more and more urgency the need to read and listen to J. Hillis Miller, and would require revisiting everything that has been said and seen. Together with the film transcript and an interview with Miller conducted by Taryn Devereux, the essays in this volume have been gathered from several international events devoted to Miller's works. With essays by Henry Sussman, Sarah Dillon, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Royle, Éamonn Dunne and Michael O’Rourke, Dragan Kujundžić, Julian Wolfreys and J. Hillis Miller, The First Sail in itself thus forms a vast network of references, operating as an installation and network of emerging projects

Faking, forging, counterfeiting: discredited practices at the margins of mimesis

Forgeries are an omnipresent part of our culture and closely related to traditional ideas of authenticity, legality, authorship, creativity, and innovation. Based on the concept of mimesis, this volume illustrates how forgeries must be understood as autonomous aesthetic practices - creative acts in themselves - rather than as mere rip-offs of an original work of art. The proceedings bring together research from different scholarly fields. They focus on various mimetic practices such as pseudo-translations, imposters, identity theft, and hoaxes in different artistic and historic contexts. By opening up the scope of the aesthetic implications of fakes, this anthology aims to consolidate forging as an autonomous method of creation

Faking, Forging, Counterfeiting

Forgeries are an omnipresent part of our culture and closely related to traditional ideas of authenticity, legality, authorship, creativity, and innovation. Based on the concept of mimesis, this volume illustrates how forgeries must be understood as autonomous aesthetic practices – creative acts in themselves – rather than as mere rip-offs of an original work of art. The proceedings bring together research from different scholarly fields. They focus on various mimetic practices such as pseudo-translations, imposters, identity theft, and hoaxes in different artistic and historic contexts. By opening up the scope of the aesthetic implications of fakes, this anthology aims to consolidate forging as an autonomous method of creation

The Small Histories project: the internet, life stories and 'performances of reconstruction'

This project revolves around Small Histories, an online web-based software system for the uploading and sharing of life stories: http://www.smallhistories.com. I created Small Histories to explore the ways in which the internet can facilitate the urge to tell, share and compare one’s personal history and, by doing so, generate an online network of interlinked personal narratives connected to historical times, events and places. The project originated with a personal event: the tracing of my biological Israeli father in 1997 and my subsequent explorations of my Israeli and German family histories. The stories I encountered in these explorations differed, depending on who was telling them. The Small Histories system was a response to the potential of the burgeoning internet to represent such differing viewpoints, and to generate new forms of encounters with the past. Since then the system has developed in tandem with the internet, especially the explosive growth over recent years of what has been called social software. Conceptually, this project explores the fast-evolving social internet as a setting for auto/biographical narrative practice and how this overlaps with and changes accepted notions of performance, community formation, identity construction and acts of memory. As a framework for these investigations, I propose that the internet is a catalyst without precedent for the production of performances of reconstruction, where fragments of the past are dug up, collected, assembled and presented as an imaginative reconstruction of ‘what used to be’, in an attempt to re-establish a lost sense of roots, identity and belonging; a coherent narrative of identity in an era of fragmentation

The Trademark Function of Authorship

The use of authorial marks in relation to the sale of creative works, like the use of business trademarks in relation to the sale of goods and services, creates social benefits that deserve legal protection. Authorial attribution acts as an incentive to authorial production, provides valuable information to consumers, and provides additional social benefits that go beyond issues of market efficiency. However, the use of authorial marks, like the use of trademarks, can create social harms. Just as counterfeiters place illegitimate trademarks on goods, exploiters of entertainment markets may be tempted to misattribute authorship. In the United States, such deceptive practices were traditionally subject to the remedial mechanisms of trademark and unfair competition laws. However, in a recent decision, Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. (2003), the United States Supreme Court held that federal trademark law does not address the misattribution of authorship. The Dastar decision stated that trademark protections were designed to protect the creators of tangible products sold in the marketplace. The Court stated that trademark law was not designed to protect the interests of those who originate creative ideas or communications. This article explores society\u27s interests in ascertaining the authorship of creative works and explains how those interests both resemble and diverge from standard trademark interests. It concludes that authorship marks are sufficiently analogous to trademarks that the Dastar approach is misguided. Consumers can and should be protected from misattributions of authorship where such misattributions can easily be remedied by law and where the failure to provide such remedies is likely to lead to significant consumer harms