No, Merkel doesn't look at a kitten, but Ivana Trump

Today, anyone with a few notions of Photoshop and a lot of leisure can manipulate a photograph to create a 'meme' that, with a bit of fortune, goes viral and can even be taken as real by some means of communication of the so-called serious.Every now and then a compilation appears in a blog with the most viral and false images of the year and we still remember that creepy photograph of the tourist on the roof of one of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, with one of the planes that crashed against them behind their backs. Every day, the networks are filled with thousands and thousands of retouched photographs and it is difficult to distinguish them from the real ones. Therefore, we are working on the creation of tools that help us in this exhausting task of being able to point with the finger, without fear of making mistakes, a manipulated image.

artificial intelligence to detect a manipulated image

That is the goal of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, who have teamed up to develop an experimental algorithm that can unmask a manipulated image.This artificial intelligence system has been trained with more than 400,000 photos from Flickr. The team used the information provided by the metadata or EXIF ​​data.Here you can find details of the camera settings, the lens, the flash, etc.

Image used in the investigation «Fighting Fake News: Image Splice Detection via Learned Self-Consistency »

As the researchers explain, an image is determined by a particular technology or process and the effects that these processes are presented consistently throughout the image.When this does not happen, it is spoken of an adulterated image. "In other words, if you learn that brushes produce that brushstrokes, you can tell if a portrait has been painted with more than one brush." ​​

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Sounds good but the case is that, in social networks, this detective work of artificial intelligence can face serious obstacles, since most sites on social networks compress images , something that could affect the algorithm and make it less accurate when detecting an i manipulated image.

Therefore, the authors of this research believe that " although the proposed model obtains advanced performance at several benchmarks, it is a simple step in the long search for an effective visual forensic tool."

The false photograph of the tourist at the top of the Twin Towers with the plane about to impact behind them.

image retouching is not something new

As we explained in Nobbot, the manipulation of photographs is not a precisely recent phenomenon .Lenin deleted Trotsky from a speech in 1917 and the dictator Franco did not disgust the retouching when, in A photo with his friend Hitler, left with his eyes closed, to put two historical examples.

Another historical image manipulated, hunted and dismantled is that of the famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 , and whose head George Eastman used the pose and office of a Sudista politician, to which he added the skull of the President killed.Years later his company would become famous for his Kodak movie cameras. There was still a lot to appear in Photoshop and Instagram filters.