Creative works, whether paintings or memes, follow unique journeys that result in their final form. Understanding these journeys, a process known as "provenance analysis", provides rich insights into the use, motivation, and authenticity underlying any given work. The application of this type of study to the expanse of unregulated content on the Internet is what we consider in this paper. Provenance analysis provides a snapshot of the chronology and validity of content as it is uploaded, re-uploaded, and modified over time. Although still in its infancy, automated provenance analysis for online multimedia is already being applied to different types of content. Most current works seek to build provenance graphs based on the shared content between images or videos. This can be a computationally expensive task, especially when considering the vast influx of content that the Internet sees every day. Utilizing non-content-based information, such as timestamps, geotags, and camera IDs can help provide important insights into the path a particular image or video has traveled during its time on the Internet without large computational overhead. This paper tests the scope and applicability of metadata-based inferences for provenance graph construction in two different scenarios: digital image forensics and cultural analytics.
Extensive studies have been carried out for detecting image forgery such as copy-move, re-sampling, blurring, and contrast enhancement. Although color modification is a common forgery technique, there is no reported forensic method for detecting this type of manipulation. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for estimating color modification in images acquired from digital cameras when the images are modified. Most commercial digital cameras are equipped with a color filter array (CFA) for acquiring the color information of each pixel. As a result, the images acquired from such digital cameras include a trace from the CFA pattern. This pattern is composed of the basic red green blue (RGB) colors, and it is changed when color modification is carried out on the image. We designed an advanced intermediate value counting method for measuring the change in the CFA pattern and estimating the extent of color modification. The proposed method is verified experimentally by using 10,366 test images. The results confirmed the ability of the proposed method to estimate color modification with high accuracy. This paper presents an application of perceptual grouping rules for content-based image retrieval. The semantic interrelationships between different primitive image features are exploited by perceptual grouping to detect the presence of manmade structures. A methodology based on these principles in a Bayesian framework for the retrieval of building images, and the results obtained are presented. The image database consists of monocular grayscale outdoor images taken from a ground-level camera. Diagnostic radiology requires accurate interpretation of complex signals in medical images. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques could be valuable to radiologists in assessing medical images by identifying similar images in large archives that could assist with decision support. Many advances have occurred in CBIR, and a variety of systems have appeared in nonmedical domains; however, permeation of these methods into radiology has been limited. Our goal in this review is to survey CBIR methods and systems from the perspective of application to radiology and to identify approaches developed in nonmedical applications that could be translated to radiology. Radiology images pose specific challenges compared with images in the consumer domain; they contain varied, rich, and often subtle features that need to be recognized in assessing image similarity. Radiology images also provide rich opportunities for CBIR: rich metadata about image semantics are provided by radiologists, and this information is not yet being used to its fullest advantage in CBIR systems. By integrating pixel-based and metadata-based image feature analysis, substantial advances of CBIR in medicine could ensue, with CBIR systems becoming an important tool in radiology practice.  Despite years of research, semantic classification of unconstrained photos is still an open problem. Existing systems have only used features derived from the image content. However, Exif metadata recorded by the camera provides cues independent of the scene content that can be exploited to improve classification accuracy. Using the problem of indoor-outdoor classification as an example, analysis of metadata statistics for each class revealed that exposure time, flash use, and subject distance are salient cues. We use a Bayesian network to integrate heterogeneous (content-based and metadata) cues in a robust fashion. Based on extensive experimental results, we make two observations: (1) adding metadata to content-based cues gives highest accuracies; and (2) metadata cues alone can outperform content-based cues alone for certain applications, leading to a system with high performance, yet requiring very little computational overhead. The benefit of incorporating metadata cues can be expected to generalize to other scene classification problems. Abstract In this paper, we propose a practical application for copyright protection of images with watermarking. The EXIF metadata of images and error-control codes are integrated into our algorithm and corresponding applications. Application for robust watermarking is one of the major branches in digital rights management (DRM) systems and digital forensics. Here, we focus on the copyright protection for images taken by ordinary cameras. By use of robust watermarking, it generally alters selected coefficients of the contents to accomplish the embedding process. Should the received image be in question, the watermark embedded beforehand can be extracted to indicate the copyright owner of such an image. We consider not only the image contents itself, but we also employ the EXIF metadata, which serves as the role of watermark, to be integrated into our scheme to make copyright protection possible. Moreover, for enhancing the performance for copyright protection, channel coding is employed and better protection capability can be expected. Taking the manufacturer, camera model, date and time stamp, and other important information in the EXIF metadata into account, conventional watermarking techniques can be applied to ordinary pictures taken by ourselves, and watermarked images with good quality can be produced. Even when the marked image has been intentionally modified, the original EXIF with selected information can mostly be recovered from the channel decoding process. Simulation results present the effectiveness of such an implementation. Today manipulation of digital images has become easy due to powerful computers, advanced photo-editing software packages and high resolution capturing devices. Verifying the integrity of images and detecting traces of tampering without requiring extra prior knowledge of the image content or any embedded watermarks is an important research field. An attempt is made to survey the recent developments in the field of digital image forgery detection and complete bibliography is presented on blind methods for forgery detection. Blind or passive methods do not need any explicit priori information about the image. First, various image forgery detection techniques are classified and then its generalized structure is developed. An overview of passive image authentication is presented and the existing blind forgery detection techniques are reviewed. The present status of image forgery detection technique is discussed along with a recommendation for future research.  Advances in photo editing and manipulation tools have made it significantly easier to create fake imagery. Learning to detect such manipulations, however, remains a challenging problem due to the lack of sufficient amounts of manipulated training data. In this paper, we propose a learning algorithm for detecting visual image manipulations that is trained only using a large dataset of real photographs. The algorithm uses the automatically recorded photo EXIF metadata as supervisory signal for training a model to determine whether an image is self-consistent -- that is, whether its content could have been produced by a single imaging pipeline. We apply this self-consistency model to the task of detecting and localizing image splices. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on several image forensics benchmarks, despite never seeing any manipulated images at training. That said, it is merely a step in the long quest for a truly general purpose visual forensics tool.   In most well known image retrieval test sets, the imagery typically cannot be freely distributed or is not representative of a large community of users. In this paper we present a collection for the MIR community comprising 25000 images from the Flickr website which are redistributable for research purposes and represent a real community of users both in the image content and image tags. We have extracted the tags and EXIF image metadata, and also make all of these publicly available. In addition we discuss several challenges for benchmarking retrieval and classification methods. Some images that are difficult to recognize on their own may become more clear in the context of a neighborhood of related images with similar social-network metadata. We build on this intuition to improve multilabel image annotation. Our model uses image metadata nonparametrically to generate neighborhoods of related images using Jaccard similarities, then uses a deep neural network to blend visual information from the image and its neighbors. Prior work typically models image metadata parametrically, in contrast, our nonparametric treatment allows our model to perform well even when the vocabulary of metadata changes between training and testing. We perform comprehensive experiments on the NUS-WIDE dataset, where we show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for multilabel image annotation even when our model is forced to generalize to new types of metadata. 