Adobe to spot fake images using Artificial Intelligence

2 min read

Adobe had already been venturing into the AI domain by coming up with products such as Adobe Sensei. Now, Adobe has developed a product that is said to be using Artificial Intelligence for detecting images that are heavily edited or images that have been tinkered with.

Adobe is aiming to create more products in the AI space in order to build trust among people in digital media. Adobe has been widely used for editing images that express artistic creativity. However, some people use it to their own unfair advantage by manipulating images for deception. But, with AI in the game, the image deception problem seems to be getting fixed.

A senior research scientist at Adobe, Vlad Morariu, has been working on computer vision technologies for a while now to detect manipulated images.

Vlad mentions that there are existing tools which help trace digitally altered photos. For instance, different file formats have metadata that store information about the image captured and manipulated. Also, forensic tools help detect the altered images by analyzing strong edges, lighting, noise distribution, and pixel values of a photo. But, these tools are not as efficient at detecting fake images.

Source: Adobe

Vlad’s continuous research led him to come up with three new techniques in Artificial Intelligence for detecting image manipulation.

Splicing: This combines different parts of two different images.
Copy-move: This involves cloning or moving of objects within a photograph from one place to another.
Removal: In this, an object within a photograph is removed and that space is filled in.

This has greatly cut down on the time it would take forensic experts to detect fraud images.

Vlad also mentions how they have trained a deep learning neural network to detect deception on thousands of known, manipulated images. It combines two different methods in one network to enhance the detection process even more.

The first method makes use of RGB stream to detect tampering. And the second method uses a noise stream filter. Although these techniques are not foolproof, they provide more options for controlling digital manipulation currently.

Adobe might get its hands dirty in the AI world even more in the future by including tools for detection of other kinds of manipulation in photographs.

To know more about Adobe’s effort in controlling digital manipulation, check out Adobe’s official blog post.