Today, the importance of using the right image authentication software can’t be overstressed. Unlike in the past, the advancement in technology has given people different methods of tampering with image evidence. Ethically, however, image manipulation and evidence tampering are very wrong, as they can affect a case in the courtroom.
As an investigator, your job isn’t only to get image and video evidence for the courtroom. In addition, you need to investigate the acquired evidence and be sure there are no possible traces of tampering or image inconsistencies. Here’s where the need to use the right image authentication software, such as Cognitech FiA 64, comes in handy.
What is Cognitech FiA 64 and how exactly does it work for image authentication? Read on to discover an answer to this question.
Digital image forgery: why image authentication matters in forensics
In case you don’t know, digital image forgery is a process of creating fake images with the help of powerful computer graphics editing software tools, such as Adobe Photoshop. Today, there are tons of different cases of digital image forgeries. The common ones are image splicing, image retouching, copy-move attack, and morphing.
- Image splicing is a process in which two composites (or even more) of images are combined to create a single (fake) image. “Spliced” is a simple copy-and-paste method, in which an image is copied and pasted into another image. If done properly, you’ll need to use the right image authentication software, such as Cognitech FiA 64, to detect the image forgery.
- While image retouching isn’t as harmful as image splicing, you shouldn’t overlook the fact that it’s also ethically wrong. This process involves using image enhancement software to enhance or reduce one or more features of image evidence. The digital image forgery method is common in the magazine industry. Its primary purpose is to help enhance the image and make it a lot more attractive to viewers.
- Copy-move attack is pretty much similar to image splicing. This method involves copying a part of an original image and moving/pasting it to a new, desired location.
Benefits of image authentication
Image authentication is necessary to detect any digital image forgery in forensic evidence. Authentication of forgeries in image evidence can be done using two major methods;
- Robust image hashing authentication
Robust image hashing authentication is an image forgery detection method that works based on Random Transform for an input image. This method helps to identify any modification of the colors of an image. That aside, image hashing authentication also helps to detect the exact forged area of a doctored image.
- Watermarking authentication
Image forgery detection can also work through watermarking. As you already know, watermarking involves adding relevant information to a video or image evidence. Robust and secure watermarking authentication is one of the few ways to identify forgeries or manipulations of image evidence. However, for you to achieve robustness and security, you need to take advantage of the spread-spectrum technique, which involves encoding data in a specified binary sequence.
Factors that influence the choice of the right image authentication tool
As an investigator, choosing the right image authentication software is an important aspect of your job. For you to choose the best tool, you need to factor in the following:
- First, you need to pick an authentication tool that’s sensitive enough to detect any forgery in the original image evidence.
- “Robustness” is another less essential factor you don’t want to joke with. Yes, the forensic tool must be robust enough to tolerate any image-preserving manipulations.
- That’s not all; the right image authentication software, such as Cognitech FiA 64, should be able to detect the exact location, where the forgery took place in the image.
- Lastly, the best tool should be able to identify the manipulations and transform the doctored image evidence back to its original form.
You can learn more on how Cognitech FiA 64 can help make your image authentication project a success.
