Differential Imaging Forensics
This provides forensic examiners with a new tool to uncover hidden visual clues in images and videos, addressing challenges in digital forensics and media authentication.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting subtle visual evidence from images, such as dim reflections, by introducing differential imaging forensics (DIF), which uses comparative analysis with a reference image to amplify and retrieve this evidence, enabling detection of forgeries like deep fakes.
We introduce some new forensics based on differential imaging, where a novel category of visual evidence created via subtle interactions of light with a scene, such as dim reflections, can be computationally extracted and amplified from an image of interest through a comparative analysis with an additional reference baseline image acquired under similar conditions. This paradigm of differential imaging forensics (DIF) enables forensic examiners for the first time to retrieve the said visual evidence that is readily available in an image or video footage but would otherwise remain faint or even invisible to a human observer. We demonstrate the relevance and effectiveness of our approach through practical experiments. We also show that DIF provides a novel method for detecting forged images and video clips, including deep fakes.