Fake news detection by image montage recognition

Abstract

Fake news have been a problem for multiple years now and in addition to this "fake images" that accompany them are becoming increasingly a problem too. The aim of such fake images is to back up the fake message itself and make it appear authentic. For this purpose, more and more images such as photo-montages are used, which have been spliced from several images. This can be used to defame people by putting them in unfavorable situations or the other way around as propaganda by making them appear more important. In addition, montages may have been altered with noise and other manipulations to make an automatic recognition more difficult. In order to take action against such montages and still detect them automated, a concept based on feature detection is developed. Furthermore, an indexing of the features is carried out by means of a nearest neighbor algorithm in order to be able to quickly compare a high number of images. Afterwards, images suspected to be a montage are reviewed by a verifier. This concept is implemented and evaluated with two feature detectors. Even montages that have been manipulated with different methods are identified as such in an average of 100 milliseconds with a probability of mostly over 90%.