Image and video source class identification

Abstract

Advances in digital technology have brought us numerous cheap yet good-quality imaging devices to capture the visionary signals into discrete form, i.e., digital images and videos. With their fast proliferation and growing popularity, a security concern arises since electronic alteration on digital multimedia data for deceiving purposes becomes incredibly easy. As an effort to restore the traditional trust on the acquired media, multimedia forensics has emerged to address mainly the challenges concerning the origin and integrity of multimedia data. As one important branch, source class identification designs the methodologies to identify the source classes and software tools based on its content. Through investigating and detecting the source features of various forms, a large number of identification methodologies have been developed in recent years and some achieved very good results. In this chapter, we review the history and major development in image and video source class identification. By first establishing an overall picture of multimedia forensics, we discuss the role of source identification in relation with other forensic fields and elaborate the existing methodologies for identification of different source types.