Image Source Coding Forensics via Intrinsic Fingerprints
In this digital era, digital multimedia contents are often transmitted over networks without any protection. This raises serious security concerns since the receivers/subscribers do not know what processes have been applied to multimedia data, and neither do they know whether this copy comes from a trusted source. Therefore, it is critical to provide forensic tools to identify the history of operations applied to multimedia data. In this paper, we focus on the identification of source coding techniques applied to multimedia, and we investigate the forensic analysis of transform based coding (both DCT and DWT based), subband coding, and linear predictive coding. Using the intrinsic fingerprints as trace of evidences, we construct an image source coding forensic system that analyzes which source encoder is used to compress the image and provides confidence measurements. Our simulation results show that the proposed system provides trustworthy performance: the probability of detecting the correct source encoder is 0.82 when PSNR = 40 dB, and it can correctly identify the source encoder with probability 0.98 with PSNR = 20dB.