Individual camera device identification from JPEG images

International audienceThe goal of this paper is to investigate the problem of source camera device identification for natural images in JPEG format. We propose an improved signal-dependent noise model describing the statistical distribution of pixels from a JPEG image. The noise model relies on the heteroscedastic noise parameters, that relates the variance of pixels’ noise with the expectation considered as unique fingerprints. It is also shown in the present paper that, non-linear response of pixels can be captured by characterizing the linear relation because those heteroscedastic parameters, which are used to identify source camera device. The identification problem is cast within the framework of hypothesis testing theory. In an ideal context where all model parameters are perfectly known, the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) is presented and its performance is theoretically established. The statistical performance of LRT serves as an upper bound of the detection power. In a practical identification, when the nuisance parameters are unknown, two generalized LRTs based on estimation of those parameters are established. Numerical results on simulated data and real natural images highlight the relevance of our proposed approach. While those results show a first positive proof of concept of the method, it still requires to be extended for a relevant comparison with PRNU-based approaches that benefit from years of experience

PRNU-based image classification of origin social network with CNN

A huge amount of images are continuously shared on social networks (SNs) daily and, in most of cases, it is very difficult to reliably establish the SN of provenance of an image when it is recovered from a hard disk, a SD card or a smartphone memory. During an investigation, it could be crucial to be able to distinguish images coming directly from a photo-camera with respect to those downloaded from a social network and possibly, in this last circumstance, determining which is the SN among a defined group. It is well known that each SN leaves peculiar traces on each content during the upload-download process; such traces can be exploited to make image classification. In this work, the idea is to use the PRNU, embedded in every acquired images, as the “carrier” of the particular SN traces which diversely modulate the PRNU. We demonstrate, in this paper, that SN-modulated noise residual can be adopted as a feature to detect the social network of origin by means of a trained convolutional neural network (CNN)

Camera-based Image Forgery Localization using Convolutional Neural Networks

Camera fingerprints are precious tools for a number of image forensics tasks. A well-known example is the photo response non-uniformity (PRNU) noise pattern, a powerful device fingerprint. Here, to address the image forgery localization problem, we rely on noiseprint, a recently proposed CNN-based camera model fingerprint. The CNN is trained to minimize the distance between same-model patches, and maximize the distance otherwise. As a result, the noiseprint accounts for model-related artifacts just like the PRNU accounts for device-related non-uniformities. However, unlike the PRNU, it is only mildly affected by residuals of high-level scene content. The experiments show that the proposed noiseprint-based forgery localization method improves over the PRNU-based reference

Color-decoupled photo response non-uniformity for digital image forensics

The last few years have seen the use of photo response non-uniformity noise (PRNU), a unique fingerprint of imaging sensors, in various digital forensic applications such as source device identification, content integrity verification and authentication. However, the use of a colour filter array for capturing only one of the three colour components per pixel introduces colour interpolation noise, while the existing methods for extracting PRNU provide no effective means for addressing this issue. Because the artificial colours obtained through the colour interpolation process is not directly acquired from the scene by physical hardware, we expect that the PRNU extracted from the physical components, which are free from interpolation noise, should be more reliable than that from the artificial channels, which carry interpolation noise. Based on this assumption we propose a Couple-Decoupled PRNU (CD-PRNU) extraction method, which first decomposes each colour channel into 4 sub-images and then extracts the PRNU noise from each sub-image. The PRNU noise patterns of the sub-images are then assembled to get the CD-PRNU. This new method can prevent the interpolation noise from propagating into the physical components, thus improving the accuracy of device identification and image content integrity verification

Mitigation of H.264 and H.265 Video Compression for Reliable PRNU Estimation

The photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) is a distinctive image sensor characteristic, and an imaging device inadvertently introduces its sensor's PRNU into all media it captures. Therefore, the PRNU can be regarded as a camera fingerprint and used for source attribution. The imaging pipeline in a camera, however, involves various processing steps that are detrimental to PRNU estimation. In the context of photographic images, these challenges are successfully addressed and the method for estimating a sensor's PRNU pattern is well established. However, various additional challenges related to generation of videos remain largely untackled. With this perspective, this work introduces methods to mitigate disruptive effects of widely deployed H.264 and H.265 video compression standards on PRNU estimation. Our approach involves an intervention in the decoding process to eliminate a filtering procedure applied at the decoder to reduce blockiness. It also utilizes decoding parameters to develop a weighting scheme and adjust the contribution of video frames at the macroblock level to PRNU estimation process. Results obtained on videos captured by 28 cameras show that our approach increases the PRNU matching metric up to more than five times over the conventional estimation method tailored for photos