In a very interesting development in the world of digital forensics, scientists have discovered that they can match a photo to a digital camera that took it. This is much in the same vein as matching a bullet via striations to a gun that fired it. This is some big news for the digital forensics front as it will go a long way to combatting against child predators on the internet.
“When a suspect is caught with images on the computer and the suspect has a digital camera in possession, the standard defense is that the images are computer-generated or downloaded from the Internet. Imagine now that you can tie them unmistakably to the camera that is in possession of the suspect,” said Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the State University of New York in Binghamton.
In the past print pics could be matched to cameras but, the digital aspect has been absent. There was no clear way to do this with video or images.
In laboratory experiments, Fridrich and her team were able to match several thousand different images to the correct camera without a single misclassification, even when images were compressed or resized.
Very cool.
[tags]Forensics, Data Recovery, Digital Images[/tags]
