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

МЕТОД ВІДОКРЕМЛЕННЯ ЦИФРОВИХ ЗОБРАЖЕНЬ В РІЗНИХ ФОРМАТАХ ПЕРВІСНОГО ЗБЕРЕЖЕННЯ, ЗАСНОВАНИЙ НА ВЛАСТИВОСТЯХ МАТРИЦІ НАЙМЕНЬШИХ СИНГУЛЯРНИХ ЧИСЕЛ БЛОКІВ

Today digital images are one of the main carriers of information, and the integrity of the image is a necessary condition for the possibility of its use for non-entertainment purposes in any field of human activity. Changing the format of an entire image or changing the format of a part of it is often the result of making unauthorized changes to the image, making the detection of the fact of re-saving to a format different from the original one an indicator of a violation of the integrity of the image. Thus, the task of separating images in different (with/without loss) formats, increasing the efficiency of which by developing a suitable method is the aim of this work, and urgent task of modern information security. The proposed method is based on the analysis of the properties of the matrix of the smallest singular values of blocks, which corresponds to the image. The algorithmic implementation of the method made it possible to increase the efficiency of separation of images in various original storage formats in comparison with analogues, as a result of which there is an overall increase in the efficiency of detecting violations of the integrity of the image, in particular during steganalysis, detection of photomontage, etc.Цифрові зображення є сьогодні одними з основних носіїв інформації, а цілісність зображення є необхідною умовою для можливості його використання з нерозважальними цілями в будь-якій галузі людської діяльності. При несанкціонованих змінах зображення часто відбувається зміна його формату або зміна формату його частини, роблячи виявлення факту перезбереження в формат, що відрізняється від первісного, покажчиком на порушення цілісності зображення, а задачу відокремлення зображень в різних (з/без втрат) форматах, підвищення ефективності якого шляхом розробки відповідного методу є метою даної роботи, актуальною задачею сучасної безпеки інформації. Запропонований метод заснований на аналізі властивостей матриці найменших сингулярних чисел блоків, що ставиться у відповідність зображенню. Алгоритмічна реалізація методу дозволила підвищити ефективність відокремлення зображень в різних форматах первісного збереження в порівнянні з аналогами, наслідком чого є підвищення в цілому ефективності виявлення порушень цілісності зображення, зокрема при стеганоаналізі, виявленні фотомонтажу тощо

New Texture Descriptor Based on Modified Fractional Entropy for Digital Image Splicing Forgery Detection

Forgery in digital images is immensely affected by the improvement of image manipulation tools. Image forgery can be classified as image splicing or copy-move on the basis of the image manipulation type. Image splicing involves creating a new tampered image by merging the components of one or more images. Moreover, image splicing disrupts the content and causes abnormality in the features of a tampered image. Most of the proposed algorithms are incapable of accurately classifying high-dimension feature vectors. Thus, the current study focuses on improving the accuracy of image splicing detection with low-dimension feature vectors. This study also proposes an approximated Machado fractional entropy (AMFE) of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to effectively capture splicing artifacts inside an image. AMFE is used as a new fractional texture descriptor, while DWT is applied to decompose the input image into a number of sub-images with different frequency bands. The standard image dataset CASIA v2 was used to evaluate the proposed approach. Superior detection accuracy and positive and false positive rates were achieved compared with other state-of-the-art approaches with a low-dimension of feature vectors

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed