Forensic Discrimination between Traditional and Compressive Imaging Systems
This work addresses a forensic analysis challenge for image authentication, but it is incremental as it applies existing machine learning methods to a new domain-specific problem.
The paper tackles the problem of distinguishing images from traditional versus compressive sensing imaging systems by modeling the imaging pipeline as an inverse problem and using blur kernels as discriminative footprints, achieving promising identification results in numerical experiments.
Compressive sensing is a new technology for modern computational imaging systems. In comparison to widespread conventional image sensing, the compressive imaging paradigm requires specific forensic analysis techniques and tools. In this regards, one of basic scenarios in image forensics is to distinguish traditionally sensed images from sophisticated compressively sensed ones. To do this, we first mathematically and systematically model the imaging system based on compressive sensing technology. Afterwards, a simplified version of the whole model is presented, which is appropriate for forensic investigation applications. We estimate the nonlinear system of compressive sensing with a linear model. Then, we model the imaging pipeline as an inverse problem and demonstrate that different imagers have discriminative degradation kernels. Hence, blur kernels of various imaging systems have utilized as footprints for discriminating image acquisition sources. In order to accomplish the identification cycle, we have utilized the state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) approaches to learn a classification system from estimated blur kernels. Numerical experiments show promising identification results. Simulation codes are available for research and development purposes.