Information Forensics and Security: A quarter-century-long journey

Information Forensics and Security (IFS) is an active R&D area whose goal is to ensure that people use devices, data, and intellectual properties for authorized purposes and to facilitate the gathering of solid evidence to hold perpetrators accountable. For over a quarter century since the 1990s, the IFS research area has grown tremendously to address the societal needs of the digital information era. The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has emerged as an important hub and leader in this area, and the article below celebrates some landmark technical contributions. In particular, we highlight the major technological advances on some selected focus areas in the field developed in the last 25 years from the research community and present future trends.

An Adaptive Method for Camera Attribution under Complex Radial Distortion Corrections

Radial correction distortion, applied by in-camera or out-camera software/firmware alters the supporting grid of the image so as to hamper PRNU-based camera attribution. Existing solutions to deal with this problem try to invert/estimate the correction using radial transformations parameterized with few variables in order to restrain the computational load; however, with ever more prevalent complex distortion corrections their performance is unsatisfactory. In this paper we propose an adaptive algorithm that by dividing the image into concentric annuli is able to deal with sophisticated corrections like those applied out-camera by third party software like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Gimp and PT-Lens. We also introduce a statistic called cumulative peak of correlation energy (CPCE) that allows for an efficient early stopping strategy. Experiments on a large dataset of in-camera and out-camera radially corrected images show that our solution improves the state of the art in terms of both accuracy and computational cost.

GPU-accelerated SIFT-aided source identification of stabilized videos

Video stabilization is an in-camera processing commonly applied by modern acquisition devices. While significantly improving the visual quality of the resulting videos, it has been shown that such operation typically hinders the forensic analysis of video signals. In fact, the correct identification of the acquisition source usually based on Photo Response non-Uniformity (PRNU) is subject to the estimation of the transformation applied to each frame in the stabilization phase. A number of techniques have been proposed for dealing with this problem, which however typically suffer from a high computational burden due to the grid search in the space of inversion parameters. Our work attempts to alleviate these shortcomings by exploiting the parallelization capabilities of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), typically used for deep learning applications, in the framework of stabilised frames inversion. Moreover, we propose to exploit SIFT features {to estimate the camera momentum and} %to identify less stabilized temporal segments, thus enabling a more accurate identification analysis, and to efficiently initialize the frame-wise parameter search of consecutive frames. Experiments on a consolidated benchmark dataset confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing the required computational time and improving the source identification accuracy. {The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AMontiB/GPU-PRNU-SIFT}}.

PRNU Emphasis: a Generalization of the Multiplicative Model

The photoresponse non-uniformity (PRNU) is a camera-specific pattern, widely adopted to solve multimedia forensics problems such as device identification or forgery detection. The theoretical analysis of this fingerprint customarily relies on a multiplicative model for the denoising residuals. This setup assumes that the nonlinear mapping from the scene irradiance to the preprocessed luminance, that is, the composition of the Camera Response Function (CRF) with the optical and digital preprocessing pipelines, is a gamma correction. Yet, this assumption seldom holds in practice. In this letter, we improve the multiplicative model by including the influence of this nonlinear mapping on the denoising residuals. We also propose a method to estimate this effect. Results evidence that the response of typical cameras deviates from a gamma correction. Experimental device identification with our model increases the TPR by a $4.93\, \%$ on average for a fixed FPR of $0.01$.

Derivation of the Asymptotic Eigenvalue Distribution for Causal 2D-AR Models under Upscaling

This technical report describes the derivation of the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution for causal 2D-AR models under an upscaling scenario. Specifically, it tackles the analytical derivation of the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution of the sample autocorrelation matrix corresponding to genuine and upscaled images. It also includes the pseudocode of the derived approaches for resampling detection and resampling factor estimation that are based on this analysis.

Fast sequential forensic camera identification

Two sequential camera source identification methods are proposed. Sequential tests implement a log-likelihood ratio test in an incremental way, thus enabling a reliable decision with a minimal number of observations. One of our methods adapts Goljan et al.'s to sequential operation. The second, which offers better performance in terms of error probabilities and average number of test observations, is based on treating the alternative hypothesis as a doubly stochastic model. We also discuss how the standard sequential test can be corrected to account for the event of weak fingerprints. Finally, we validate the goodness of our methods with experiments.