This image has been modified in several places. The digital forensic techniques described on the following pages could be used to detect where changes were made.
Image: SciAm staff
In Brief
- Fraudulent photographs produced with powerful, commercial software appear constantly, spurring a new field of digital image forensics.
- Many fakes can be exposed because of inconsistent lighting, including the specks of light reflected from people’s eyeballs.
- Algorithms can spot when an image has a “cloned” area or does not have the mathematical properties of a raw digital photograph.
More In This Article
History is riddled with the remnants of photographic tampering. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Brezhnev each had photographs manipulated—from creating more heroic-looking poses to erasing enemies or bottles of beer. In Stalin’s day, such phony images required long hours of cumbersome work in a darkroom, but today anyone with a computer can readily produce fakes that can be very hard to detect.
Barely a month goes by without some newly uncovered fraudulent image making it into the news. In February, for instance, an award-winning photograph depicting a herd of endangered Tibetan antelope apparently undisturbed by a new high-speed train racing nearby was uncovered to be a fake. The photograph had appeared in hundreds of newspapers in China after the controversial train line was opened with much patriotic fanfare in mid-2006. A few people had noticed oddities immediately, such as how some of the antelope were pregnant, but there were no young, as should have been the case at the time of year the train began running. Doubts finally became public when the picture was featured in the Beijing subway this year and other flaws came to light, such as a join line where two images had been stitched together. The photographer, Liu Weiqing, and his newspaper editor resigned; Chinese government news agencies apologized for distributing the image and promised to delete all of Liu’s photographs from their databases.
Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.
See what we're tweeting about
10 Comments
Add CommentI think it's pretty petty of you guys to lead us to this site to see more on the subject and then we find out we have to pay extra for it. I have been a subscriber of your magazine for years, but I think that may be over - seems like you could post more info for free, after all we're paying for the magazine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a subscriber to your magazine, I should be able to access ALL of the articles in each issue online! Also, the online pix look identical yet the magazine article said the fire hydrant was added.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey Folks, FYI you need to click the next button to see the undoctored image. -Geo.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree with the comments of earlier commenters about (a) subscribers to the print version being able to access all the articles in the online version and (b) it's being petty to lead us to this site and then try to charge us extra for it. Shame on Scientific American!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi am able to look at lots of articles... i am not a print subscriber anymore, it's been a few years. But my account here has no relation to that old account. I love this site. I read anything i can here. I have yet to be turned away for not having paid fomr something.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjust my thoughts
oh, and yes, you have to click on the button below the picture to see the two pics... and also there is a link below the article to see a full description of all the changes in the picture.
Me interesa destacar del articulo un tema: los politicos suelen exponer al publico una imagen que no corresponde a la realidad.Su juego consiste en hacernos creer que no son seres de carne y hueso como todos nosotros,sino casi dioses.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEn esa impostura se fundamente el "carisma" de los lideres politicos,sin importar sean de derecha,centro o izquierda. Simplemente siguen ciertas reglas de juego que fueron magistralmente descritas por Duverger en los años 60. Y curiosamente aunque ciertos sectores sabemos que ahi reside su "poder",tendemos a vivir con y dentro del "engaño" porque son reglas de juego impuestas por ese "dominio" cada vez mas confuso ,perverso e inhumano que se llama:la politica.
More on the button:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no button visible on my screen here, but I found it after being informed by reading the complaints above.
Try this: Drag the cursor slowly around (actually to either side) the "IMAGE 1 of 2" statement. When the cursor becomes a finger pointer (or whatever you cursor click image is), you have found the invisible button.
If your display has been defined with something other than an arrow for the cursor, go point at some obvious click site, like [More] and the end of some comment above and see what your cursor becomes. Or drag the cursor through some text that has embedded links. You will eventually figure out how this works.
And please try to be polite to the editors. Demanding and manipulating will not aid your quest for knowledge. SCIAM is a for-profit venture, run by real human beings, like you.
And there you have it: doctored digital text. Who will ever know?
--
Edited by Bradley at 06/03/2008 2:07 PM
Great article, but I didn't need any high-tec computer to tell me that was a mans body with a gilrs face. Very narrow hips with big boney knees. If a girl had those legs her face would have been much leaner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHi, I went into the page source view and after a little exploring found the coding for the image links. By tacking them on to the Scientific American URL, I was able to view the undoctored image in another browser bar. Once you get the original up, you can see what they mean by "her" at the end of the article. (Of course, I could have figured that out after studying the image for longer than 15 seconds.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is the address you can put into your browser to take you to the original image:
http://www.sciam.com//media/inline/B9152F3F-E303-5593-5FC5C22DE3E694DB_3.jpg
Re: Digital Image Forensics article in Scientific American magazine June 2008 issue. I found one other issue with the picture of the two cyclists. The thigh/knee bone of this so called
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this