ToothPic: Camera-Based Image Retrieval on Large Scales

Abstract

Being able to reliably link a picture to the device that shot it is of paramount importance to give credit or assign responsibility to the author of the picture itself. However, this task needs to be performed at large scales due to the recent explosion in the number of photos taken and shared. Existing methods cannot satisfy those requirements. Methods based on the photo response nonuniformity (PRNU) of digital sensors are able to link a photo to the device that shot it and have already been used as proof in the Court of Law. Such methods are reliable but so far, they can be only used for small-scale forensic tasks involving few cameras and pictures. ToothPic, an acronym for “Who Took This Picture?,” is a novel image retrieval engine that allows to find all the pictures in a large-scale database shot by a given query camera.