Digital Image Forensics

H. Farid

Scientific American, June, 2008

Paper not yet available

History is riddled with the remnants of photographic tampering. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Castro and Brezhnev each had photographs manipulated — from creating more heroic-looking poses to erasing enemies or bottles of beer. In Stalin’s day, such phony images required long hours of cumbersome work in a darkroom, but today anyone with a computer can readily produce fakes that can be very hard to detect.