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Binghamton University faculty Jessica Fridrich talks about Digital Forensics on FOX News.
Child pornographers will soon have a harder time escaping prosecution thanks to a stunning new technology that can reliably link digital images to the camera with which they were taken, in much the same way that tell-tale scratches are used by forensic examiners to link bullets to the gun that fired them.
The defense in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this persons camera or that the images are not of real children, said Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Sometimes child pornographers will even cut and paste an image of an adults head on the image of a child to try to avoid prosecution.But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the persons cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case than if you just have a bunch of digital images that we all know are notoriously easy to manipulate.
Fridrich and two members of her Binghamton University research team Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan are coinventors of the new technique, which can also be used to detect forged images.The three have applied for two patents related to their technique, which provides the most robust strategy for digital image forgery detection to date, even as it improves significantly on the accuracy of other approaches.
There are about six or seven forgery detection techniques in the literature, Fridrich said. And each one of them breaks at a certain point. You can always come up with a case where any particular technique including ours will not be applicable. So our technique is another tool for forensic examiners to use to see an example of the noise the researchers believe to be unique to each digital camera, in cases where they have the camera itself or multiple images taken by the same camera. The nice part about this is that the reliability with which you can reach a decision about forgeries is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever built before.Fridrichs technique is rooted in the discovery by her research group of this simple fact: Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity. Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or fingerprint of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera.
That means that as long as examiners have either the camera that took the image or multiple images they know were taken by the same camera, an algorithm developed by Fridrich and her co-inventors to extract and define the cameras unique pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity can be used to provide important information about the origins and authenticity of a single image.The limitation of the technique is that it requires either the camera or multiple images taken by the same camera, and isnt informative if only a single image is available for analysis.
Like actual fingerprints, the digital noise in original images is stochastic in nature that is, it contains random variables which are inevitably created during the manufacturing process of the camera and its sensors. This virtually ensures that the noise imposed on the digital images from any particular camera will be consistent from one image to the next, even while it is distinctly different.Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and two colleagues have developed a technique that can tie digital images from the noise produced by any other camera even one of the same make and model. In preliminary tests, Fridrichs lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.
"Now, we are focusing on analyzing the reliability and mathematically describing the algorithm," she added. Fridrich, who specializes in all aspects of information hiding in digital imagery, including watermarking for authentication, tamper detection, self-embedding, robust watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, as well as forensic analysis of digital images, says it is the absence of the expected digital fingerprint in any portion of an image that provides the most conclusive evidence of image tampering.
A simulated swarm of three dozen autonomous robots explore and map a complex home environment by Josh Brandoff and Hiroki Sayama from the Binghamton University Bioengineering Department.
Swarm robotics is a relatively new field of research with a focus on mutually interacting, self-organizing robots that collectively achieve tasks solely through the use of decentralized local mechanisms. The idea is borrowed from biological systems, such as social insects, which show robust and adaptive collective intelligence. Compared to traditional robotic solutions, swarm robotics holds promise of providing more reliable and cost-effective solutions to various complex problems due to its distributed nature and decreased per-unit cost.
For more information, see: http://coco.binghamton.edu
Bahgat Sammakia, director of Binghamton's Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, is ushering in a new age of flexible electronics. "A computer the size and shape of a ballpoint pen, or biomedical or environmental sensors woven into clothing, are the sorts of ideas that are on the doorstep of becoming real."
So flexible electronics are electronics which do the same things that traditional electronics do, with the big difference that they are lightweight, and they are built onto flexible substrates. So we can think of a sheet of plastic that has a display on it, and can also have a keyboard, and can be woven into clothing, so it's very lightweight, very rugged, hopefully very inexpensive and very high quality. Some of the mid-term applications for flexible electronics are going to be a set of evolutionary improvements over traditional electronics, so we can think of computers that are lighter-weight, and more rugged packaging that is flexible and can accommodate multiple chips. So, small improvements in engineering that result in cheaper, better-performing electronics.
You can also think about mid-term applications. Things like an electronic newspaper, a newspaper that can be downloaded directly on a sheet that you carry with you, and you can fold and put in your pocket. Other applications would be wallpaper that emits light gradually and senses you as you enter the room, solar panels that are used just like roofing tiles -- can be nailed to the roof, but collect energy allowing you to use it in the home. So there's a very wide range, and all of these things are being worked on today, so this is not a dream. These are things that will happen.
The long-term applications and implications are just tremendous. To me, the ultimate things are things that deal with people's lives and their health, so biomedical applications are obviously a very exciting application. They can be simple things, like wearable electronics that diagnose people's health and sense their environment, and warn them if there's something harmful in the environment. You can have point-of-care medicine. So for people with chronic pain, you can have clothing that senses their pain, and senses what's causing it, and does something about it.
You can have clothing that calls in medical help when it's necessary, so applications that deal with people directly, and, even longer term than that, you can think of electronics that can be directly interfaced to living tissue, so you can have artificial organs. You can have applications where you can dispense medication and control health, and do something about emergency situations until medical help arrives.
