IEEE Access Special Section: Digital Forensics Through Multimedia Source Inference

Abstract

With the prevalence of low-cost imaging devices (smartphones, tablets, camcorders, digital cameras, scanners, wearable, and IoT devices), images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in every walk of life. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of multimedia on digital social platforms. In the meantime, powerful multimedia editing tools allow even unskilled people to easily manipulate digital content for malicious or criminal purposes. In all cases where multimedia serves as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, the authenticity of multimedia sources, and the integrity of multimedia content become essential to forensic investigators. Imaging devices and post-acquisition processing software leave unique “fingerprints” in multimedia content. This allows many challenging problems faced by the multimedia forensics community to be addressed through source inference. Source inference is the task of linking digital content to the source device or platform (e.g., social media such as Facebook) responsible for its creation. It can facilitate applications such as identification and verification of source device and platform, common source inference, content integrity verification, and source-oriented image clustering. It also allows the establishment of digital evidence or the history of multimedia processing steps applied to the content, starting from the acquisition procedure and up to tracking the spread. The recent adoption of multimedia source inference techniques in the law enforcement sector (e.g., U.K. Sussex Police, Guildford Crown Court, and INTERPOL) in real-world criminal cases and child sexual exploitation databases has manifested the significant value of multimedia source inference in the fight against crime. This Special Section in IEEE Access aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in digital forensics through multimedia source inference.