Image stabilization performed during imaging and/or post-processing poses one
of the most significant challenges to photo-response non-uniformity based
source camera attribution from videos. When performed digitally, stabilization
involves cropping, warping, and inpainting of video frames to eliminate
unwanted camera motion. Hence, successful attribution requires the inversion of
these transformations in a blind manner. To address this challenge, we
introduce a source camera verification method for videos that takes into
account the spatially variant nature of stabilization transformations and
assumes a larger degree of freedom in their search. Our method identifies
transformations at a sub-frame level, incorporates a number of constraints to
validate their correctness, and offers computational flexibility in the search
for the correct transformation. The method also adopts a holistic approach in
countering disruptive effects of other video generation steps, such as video
coding and downsizing, for more reliable attribution. Tests performed on one
public and two custom datasets show that the proposed method is able to verify
the source of 23-30% of all videos that underwent stronger stabilization,
depending on computation load, without a significant impact on false
attribution