Saturday, March 7, 2009
Barely a month goes by without some newly uncovered fraudulent image making it into the news. In February, for instance, an award-winning photograph depicting a herd of endangered Tibetan antelope apparently undisturbed by a new high-speed train racing nearby was uncovered to be a fake. The photograph had appeared in hundreds of newspapers in China after the controversial train line was opened with much patriotic fanfare in mid-2006. A few people had noticed oddities immediately, such as how some of the antelope were pregnant, but there were no young, as should have been the case at the time of year the train began running. Doubts finally became public when the picture was featured in the Beijing subway this year and other flaws came to light, such as a join line where two images had been stitched together. The photographer, Liu Weiqing, and his newspaper editor resigned; Chinese government news agencies apologized for distributing the image and promised to delete all of Liu’s photographs from their databases.
In that case, as with many of the most publicized instances of fraudulent images, the fakery was detected by alert people studying a copy of the image and seeing flaws of one kind or another. But there are many other cases when examining an image with the naked eye is not enough to demonstrate the presence of tampering, so more technical, computer-based methods—digital image forensics—must be brought to bear.
posted by Md Aiman. @
10:41 PM