Some Advances in Digital-Image Forensics

A program of research in the forensic analysis of digital images has yielded several proposed techniques for automated image-data processing to answer questions concerning the source, authenticity, and integrity of a given image or set of images. The need for such techniques arises because the ease with which digital images can be created and altered without leaving obvious traces can give rise to doubts about their credibility, especially when they are used as legal evidence. Like other proposed techniques of image forensics, the techniques reported here are subject to limitations. Because none of the techniques by itself offers a definitive solution to the digital-image-verification problem, the research continues in an effort to propose new techniques and combine them with existing techniques to obtain more reliable decisions.