Reuters Intends To Put Its Own Fauxtogs Out Of Business

Via Gizmodo, Wired is reporting that Reuters is working alongside fellow media hornswoggler the Associated Press, as well as Adobe and Canon, to help rid the world of doctored photographs through the creation of a "suite of photo-authentication tools" that can detect manipulation.

Aspiring Adnan Hajj's, take heed.

Adobe plans to start rolling out the technology in a number of photo-authentication plug-ins for its Photoshop product beginning as early as 2008. The company is working with a leading digital forgery specialist at Dartmouth College, who met with the Associated Press last month.

The push follows a media scandal over a doctored war photograph published by Reuters last year. The news agency has since announced that it's working with both Adobe and Canon to come up with ways to prevent a recurrence of the incident.
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In the most famous recent case, a blogger [Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs] uncovered the doctoring of a war photo taken in Lebanon by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj. The photographer was fired, and Reuters has since clarified its rules about the use of Photoshop.

The secret is in the power of the Glycemic index.

Among other things, Adobe is developing a tool that will detect the use of the copying tool known as the "clone stamp." The tool will identify when two areas in a photo are "impossibly similar," Story said.

Ah, yes.  Impossibly similar images.  Like this one.  Or that one.

Adobe expects another tool will perform an analysis similar to firearm ballistics -- confirming the model of camera that took an image, and matching the image to the individual camera, if it's available.

The company also hopes to develop a plug-in that will detect if a photo has been changed at all since it was taken. According to Farid, this is possible because cameras don't record all the pixels needed for a color image, but instead estimate some colors through a process known as color reconstruction, or demosaicing.

A camera's demosaicing process creates connections between pixels, and "when an image is re-touched, it is likely that these correlations will be destroyed. As such, the presence or lack of these correlations can be used to authenticate an image, or expose it as a forgery," Farid writes in an explanation (.pdf) of the technology he is developing.

Neat.  Anything that will help tie the hands of bad faith, disingenuous, agenda-driven "journalism" strikes me as a step in the right direction.  Still...

Remember that sense of relief you felt when the internets' white knights first graced us with the bedazzling grandeur of the "spam filter"?  They'd finally figured out all the neredowellian tricks of the trade and we'd go on to live out our lives unpestered by Nigerian bankers and v1agra solicitations.

I'm faintly reminded of that moment.

Elsewhere:  Michelle Malkin, Hot Air