Tuesday, 20 December 2016

Researchers tackle the fake news problem by examining photos

MathWorks cites the work done by MMLab at University of Trento

Versione stampabile

The ubiquitous nature of mobile phones has enabled everyday citizens to become citizen reporters. They can cover breaking news even more quickly than traditional news reporters. But when combined with the powerful image editing capabilities in many software packages, it becomes difficult to distinguish between actual news photos and their doctored versions.

A team of researchers from the University of Trento (Italy), MMLAB, Group on Multimedia Forensics lead by Giulia Boato, recently published a paper, Towards the verification of image integrity in online news, which investigates a methodology using image analysis to identify images that are altered in an attempt to falsify news reporting.

The team proposes a tool that can verify the consistency of images used in a news article with other visually similar images related to the same news topic. The goal: determine when an image has been doctored from the original. The paper includes example photos showing when news sites had taken liberties with images accompany news articles.

Read the article on MathWorks