Microsoft and Duke Partner to Find Media Fakery

If you've ever thought "this looks shopped" Microsoft has a fix for you.

Adobe Photoshop is as much a godsend for graphic artists as unattractive celebrities, providing creative artists with a Reality Distortion Field comparable to the one Steve Jobs used to generate. While that's great for making a plain jane celeb look attractive (for them, anyway), Photoshop also means an Internet full of fakes, some of which can be devastating to the people involved.

So Microsoft Research, in partnership with Duke University researchers, has come up with YouProce, a technology that examines images to look for variances and alterations in images, video and audio files to find fakery.

The motivation wasn't to prove that Photoshopped nudes of an actress are fake, it was for citizen journalists who are doing the work of news outlets when something breaks out, like in Libya this year or Iran in 2009.

"Deploying trusted reporters and photographers into events such as those recently experienced in Iran, Haiti, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya is difficult. Due to logistical obstacles, government bans, and reprisals against journalists, anonymous local citizens with camera phones were instrumental in documenting these situations. Thus, given the increasingly large role crowd-sourced content plays in world affairs and the dire consequences that dissemination of falsified media could have, verifying the authenticity of this data is paramount," the researchers said in their report (here in PDF format).

So the group modified an Android phone (Ballmer will not be pleased) so that it keeps copies of images or audio clips that are opened in the phone's apps, such as Photoshop Express for Android, and tracks what modifications the app has made.

If the app saves a modified version of the media to a file on a phone or sends it over a wireless network, YouProve analyzes the original and modified files and produces a fidelity certificate that identifies and displays what has been changed and where.

Cox says the fidelity certificates are produced using emerging tamper-resistant, "trusted" hardware on mobile devices that guarantees they are generated securely and cannot be fabricated. He says that the hardware is a standard feature on PCs and new smartphones but it remains largely unused on both platforms.

The certificate of fidelity can be posted online along with the image, so citizen reporters have certification that they have not messed with the picture. For citizen reporting services like CNN's iReports and Al Jazeera's Sharek, that can help cut down on fakery and insure image integrity.

Of course, that won't stop jokers who do 'Shopping on their PCs, but it does provide some level of integrity for people on the scene who capture news with their camera phone, and it will undoubtedly have applications for business users as well, when they can provide certification of unaltered photo evidence.

• Microsoft
• Smartphones
• editing
• image
• media
• Microsoft
• Photoshop