A clean technology can recognize the 'fingerprint' of the cameras and smartphone sensors

Shares, repost, images downloaded and then uploaded to your profile: it is very difficult to determine and trace the origin of an image. Every day there are more than 350 million images shared by a billion people who populate Facebook; this number must be added that of the images uploaded to Flickr, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr or Pinterest. The everything with growing numbers. Reshare image without permission, even perhaps with profit-making is one of the problems that managers of social networks are having to cope on a daily basis, with few resources available to counter any abuse.
A technology developed by the Politecnico di Torino Today, however, could help solve this problem. Each camera is indeed a unique and unrepeatable set of different components, such as to impress upon the images a kind of digital fingerprint device that took the image. As informs the Polytechnic of Turin, the research project "ToothPic - A large-scale room identification system based on compressed fingerprints" is intended to show that this fingerprint can be used to effectively manage the huge amount of photos on the Internet . The project, coordinated by prof. Enrico Magli of the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications (DET) of the Polytechnic by the European Union will receive a loan of 150 thousand Euros under the ERC call - Proof of Concept, reserved for scientific excellence projects that include the construction of commercial applications and social from ERC previously funded projects.

The goal of the project is to create a search engine that, given a camera or photo taken from it the machine, to be able to track down, scanning the network, all the photos taken from the same machine. Behind the project is a technology developed by researchers at the Politecnico di Torino as part of an ERC Starting Grant project: the key to the technology is the compression of the fingerprint camera. If it should prove a good operation, the technology could bring down one of the more mistrust that photographers encounter sharing images over the network, maybe even freeing us from the cumbersome watermarks that are often one of the few ways to protect your photos. The statement indicates that the search engine will be validated on a database of fingerprints obtained by downloading photos from Flickr.

The technology works with all systems that snap digital photographs, including smartphones: are the small manufacturing defects of the sensors that create these impressions. During the production phase, in fact, not all pixels are perfect and perfectly equal to each other: the PoliTo technology is able to derive and map these differences, giving each sensor his identity card. As we study the researchers turned the question: "How does the the 'fingerprint recognition technology' of the sensors if the images after the shot are processed or handled?". Stay tuned to learn more.