In the world of the Internet, we just can’t resist snapping and sharing our clicks. At the cost of our privacy, many people have embraced the world of social media, giving other people access to our memories and experiences.
Of course, you have that one friend or two who seems to snap the most sharpest (and envy-inducing) pictures, making us wonder if its really the real thing or not. Software like Photoshop, Snapseed and Instagram have made it stupidly easy to give your photos that perfect makeover.
There is of course a flip side to having powerful photo manipulation tools at our disposal. People have used it for ulterior motives too. And in a world where fake news can go viral within seconds, this presents a grave issue indeed.
How can you tell a real image from a fake one? Lets read on.
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Fake vs Real Images
Like most products and services available to the general public, people don’t have the courtesy to be mindful of ethical practices. So what can we do to point out the fakes? Unless photo manipulation is painfully obvious most people can’t really tell.
This guide has a solution:
A group of researchers from Berkeley created a model to identify manipulated photographs featuring human faces. In their research paper “Detecting Photoshopped Faces by Scripting Photoshop“, the researchers explain more about manipulating human faces using editing tools and how their model identifies that.
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Sheng-Yu Wang, Oliver Wang, Andrew Owens, Richard Zhang, and Alexei A. Efros created a tool based on their model. They explained that “most malicious photo manipulations” are done using regular editing tools, such as Adobe Photoshop.
Their method of identifying photo-manipulation is centered around Photoshop’s basic tool ‘image warping‘. The tool geometrically manipulates human faces.
“We present a method for detecting one very popular Photoshop manipulation – image warping applied to human faces – using a model trained entirely using fake images that were automatically generated by scripting Photoshop itself.”
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How does it work?
Plenty of people who use Adobe Photoshop are familiar with the image warp tool. Yet there aren’t many tools to detect such manipulation and undo it.
In response, these researchers created their own model which can also be used to undo the manipulation in certain cases.
“We show that our model outperforms humans at the task of recognizing manipulated images, can predict the specific location of edits, and in some cases can be used to “undo” a manipulation to reconstruct the original, unedited image. We demonstrate that the system can be successfully applied to real, artist-created image manipulations.”
The model is trained by using artificially generated images, so it can easily detect fakes. This makes it possible to train deep learning systems. Once the model has identified that an image is fake, it can then detect which parts of the image were manipulated or the ‘suggested flow magnitude’.
Then the model can predict to what extent an image was doctored and suggest an ‘undo’ to recreate the original image.
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Since this is a new model, how accurately does it do its job? According to the researchers, their model does way better than humans. It sounds like a good start.
While the model does show a high degree of accuracy, that does not reduce the need for further research into this issue. It’s appalling that there are not many pre-existing models to detect photo manipulation techniques as commonly used as imaging warping via Photoshop.
At least we can tell when someone has used the cat filter for their picture right? Right?
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