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Colloquium Details

Photo Forensics

Author:Hany Farid Dartmouth
Date:January 23, 2014
Time:15:30
Location:220 Deschutes

Abstract

From the tabloid magazines to main-stream media outlets, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that land in our email, doctored photographs are appearing with a growing frequency and sophistication. The resulting lack of trust is impacting law enforcement, national security, the media, e-commerce, and more. The field of photo forensics has emerged to help return some trust in photography. In the absence of any digital watermark or signature, we work on the assumption that most forms of tampering will disturb some statistical or geometric property of an image. To the extent that these perturbations can be quantified and detected, they can be used to invalidate a photo. I will describe several different forensic techniques and illustrate their application to analyzing photos including the famous and incriminating backyard photo of Lee Harvey Oswald (the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy).

Biography

Hany Farid received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Rochester in 1989. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Following a two year post-doctoral position in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, he joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 1999, where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science. Hany is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.