Growing data privacy demands, driven by regulations like GDPR and CCPA, require machine unlearning methods capable of swiftly removing the influence of specific training points. Although verified approaches like SISA, using data slicing and checkpointing, achieve efficient unlearning for single models by reverting to intermediate states, these methods struggle in teacher-student knowledge distillation settings. Unlearning in the teacher typically forces costly, complete student retraining due to pervasive information propagation during distillation. Our primary contribution is PURGE (Partitioned Unlearning with Retraining Guarantee for Ensembles), a novel framework integrating verified unlearning with distillation. We introduce constituent mapping and an incremental multi-teacher strategy that partitions the distillation process, confines each teacher constituent’s impact to distinct student data subsets, and crucially maintains data isolation. The PURGE framework substantially reduces retraining overhead—requiring only partial student updates—when teacher-side unlearning occurs. We provide both theoretical analysis, quantifying significant speed-ups in the unlearning process, and empirical validation on multiple datasets, demonstrating that PURGE achieves these efficiency gains while maintaining student accuracy comparable to standard baselines.

Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU) has been used as a powerful device fingerprint for image forgery detection because image forgeries can be revealed by finding the absence of the PRNU in the manipulated areas. The correlation between an image's noise residual with the device's reference PRNU is often compared with a decision threshold to check the existence of the PRNU. A PRNU correlation predictor is usually used to determine this decision threshold assuming the correlation is content-dependent. However, we found that not only the correlation is content-dependent, but it also depends on the camera sensitivity setting. Camera sensitivity, commonly known by the name of ISO speed, is an important attribute in digital photography. In this work, we will show the PRNU correlation's dependency on ISO speed. Due to such dependency, we postulate that a correlation predictor is ISO speed-specific, i.e. reliable correlation predictions can only be made when a correlation predictor is trained with images of similar ISO speeds to the image in question. We report the experiments we conducted to validate the postulate. It is realized that in the real-world, information about the ISO speed may not be available in the metadata to facilitate the implementation of our postulate in the correlation prediction process. We hence propose a method called Content-based Inference of ISO Speeds (CINFISOS) to infer the ISO speed from the image content.

Device fingerprints like sensor pattern noise (SPN) are widely used for provenance analysis and image authentication. Over the past few years, the rapid advancement in digital photography has greatly reshaped the pipeline of image capturing process on consumer-level mobile devices. The flexibility of camera parameter settings and the emergence of multi-frame photography algorithms, especially high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, bring new challenges to device fingerprinting. The subsequent study on these topics requires a new purposefully built image dataset. In this paper, we present the Warwick Image Forensics Dataset, an image dataset of more than 58,600 images captured using 14 digital cameras with various exposure settings. Special attention to the exposure settings allows the images to be adopted by different multi-frame computational photography algorithms and for subsequent device fingerprinting. The dataset is released as an open-source, free for use for the digital forensic community.