Scene Illumination as an Indicator of Image Manipulation

The goal of blind image forensics is to distinguish original and manipulated images. We propose illumination color as a new indicator for the assessment of image authenticity. Many images exhibit a combination of multiple illuminants (flash photography, mixture of indoor and outdoor lighting, etc.). In the proposed method, the user selects illuminated areas for further investigation. The illuminant colors are locally estimated, effectively decomposing the scene in a map of differently illuminated regions. Inconsistencies in such a map suggest possible image tampering. Our method is physics-based, which implies that the outcome of the estimation can be further constrained if additional knowledge on the scene is available. Experiments show that these illumination maps provide a useful and very general forensics tool for the analysis of color images.