Focus Manipulation Detection via Photometric Histogram Analysis

Can Chen, Scott McCloskey, Jingyi Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 1674-1682

With the rise of misinformation spread via social media channels, enabled by the increasing automation and realism of image manipulation tools, image forensics is an increasingly relevant problem. Classic image forensic methods leverage low-level cues such as metadata, sensor noise fingerprints, and others that are easily fooled when the image is re-encoded upon upload to facebook, etc. This necessitates the use of higher-level physical and semantic cues that, once hard to estimate reliably in the wild, have become more effective due to the increasing power of computer vision. In particular, we detect manipulations introduced by artificial blurring of the image, which creates inconsistent photometric relationships between image intensity and various cues. We achieve 98% accuracy on the most challenging cases in a new dataset of blur manipulations, where the blur is geometrically correct and consistent with the scene's physical arrangement. Such manipulations are now easily generated, for instance, by smartphone cameras having hardware to measure depth, e.g. `Portrait Mode' of the iPhone7Plus. We also demonstrate good performance on a challenge dataset evaluating a wider range of manipulations in imagery representing `in the wild' conditions.