• W. Sabrina Lin, Steven K. Tjoa, H. Vicky Zhao, and K. J. Ray Liu
• IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security, September 2009
• Download: Paper, BibTeX

  @ARTICLE{lin2009tifs,
    title = "Digital Image Source Coder Forensics via Intrinsic Fingerprints",
    author = "W. Sabrina Lin and Steven K. Tjoa and H. Vicky Zhao and K. J. Ray Liu",
    journal = "IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security",
    year = "2009",
    month = sep,
    volume = "4",
    number = "3",
    pages = "460--475"
  };

Multimedia forensic methods allow us to verify and maintain the integrity of our multimedia data. For example, we can embed a watermark into a digital image to bind the identity of its owner to the image itself. However, traditional forensic approaches such as watermarking are not applicable in many real-world scenarios, for example, when we do not have access to the original data.

In this paper, we investigate the use of intrinsic fingerprints — subsets of data which are, or have become, an intrinsic part of the data in question — for formulating a forensic methodology that can identify the compression history of a digital image. By examining the intrinsic fingerprints in an image, we can tell what compression method (e.g., JPEG, etc.) was used in order to determine the origin of the image and thereby assess its authenticity.

Although there exist methods that estimate parameters of individual compression schemes, to our knowledge, our work is the first to address the problem of image compression identification and offer a unified forensic framework incorporating multiple encoders.