Robust Digital Camera Identification Based on Pairwise Magnitude Relations of Clustered Sensor Pattern Noise

Abstract

Owing to the rapid progress in digital camera technologies, a large amount of image content is distributed on the World Wide Web. Digital camera identification, which is the identification of the source camera of an input image, is becoming increasingly important for presenting evidence in a court and helping police investigations. In recent years, a digital camera identification method using the image sensor's pattern noise has received considerable attention. Photo-response non-uniformity (PRNU) noise is mainly generated by the existence of differences between the sensitivities of pixels, and it is useful as a fingerprint of a camera. However, the PRNU noise of an image is usually contaminated by random noise and scene content and affected by the image processing engine, which inhibits stable identification. In this paper, we propose a novel digital camera identification method using the pairwise magnitude relations of image sensor noise, which are robust to noise contamination. By performing experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method can identify the source cameras of query images with high accuracy.