Fake Image Detection

Introduction

This is a frying pan.

This is a frying pan with a badly drawn pair of eggs in it.

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The phrase “X has been Photoshopped” has become shorthand for “this piece of media has been edited in some manner.” Sometimes it’s as simple as adding on a pair of fried eggs to an image, or other times its color correction, film grain additions, creating motions, adding in additional elements — the list really is just about limitless. 

This sort of image manipulation has been popular for many reasons for decades, and can be seen on social media on a daily basis. Since it has such a wide-ranging reach though, what can we do about detecting modified images? 

File details and comparisons

Comparing details about a particular file can be very telling about what is an original image and what has been tweaked after the fact. The first things we can check are creation and modification dates. To do this in Windows, we can right-click on the file and select “Properties.”

In this case, because we saved it from an online source, it can be difficult sometimes to get accurate data due to the way that files are saved. Fortunately, we can still take a look at the image’s EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) metadata to see what it can show us. To do this under Windows, all we have to do is click on the “Details” tab above. 

This now shows us that the picture itself was taken in 2010, and edited in Photoshop CS2. Metadata has an enormous amount of information about images such as resolution, camera hardware, shutter speed — information that can help professionals in determining if what they are seeing on the screen is what (Read more...)