Due to a constant imbalance between demand and supply of power, ENF (Electric Network Frequency) fluctuates around a nominal value of 50 or 60 Hz. These variations in ENF cause the luminance intensity of a mains-powered light source, having no AC/DC converter inside, also to fluctuate. As a result, a video of a scene illuminated by a mains-powered light source can be used to estimate these fluctuations. As a consequence, the ENF signal within the time period when the video was captured can be estimated. This work explores the effects of frame rate harmonics that emerge when a rolling shutter based approach is used for ENF estimation from videos captured using CMOS cameras. These harmonics are a problem, especially for videos whose frame rate is a divisor of the nominal ENF because the frame rate harmonics and the ENF harmonics overlap. It is discovered that a key reason for the presence of the harmonics is the inverse square law of light that results in some repeating patterns of luminance variation across frames. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of the inverse square law of light on ENF estimation. A technique for refined ENF-related luminance signal estimation is proposed that attenuates these frame rate harmonics. This enables more accurate ENF estimates. The work also proposes an approach to estimate ENF-related luminance waveform cycles within each video frame, and a method to compute the confidence score for the estimated cycles. It provides insight into the reliability of the extracted ENF signal from a video, in the sense of its usefulness for ENF forensics, and consequently for ENF detection, which is an important precursor to ENF-based video forensics.

Electric Network Frequency (ENF) continuously fluctuates around a nominal value (50/60 Hz) due to a persistent imbalance between supplied and demanded power. In certain circumstances, ENF gets intrinsically embedded into audio and video recordings and can be extracted from these recordings. Consequently, ENF can be used in a number of media forensic applications, such as verifying the time of recording of the media. In this work, a robust media time-stamping approach is proposed for media whose ENF content is relatively contaminated. It essentially entails two procedures: first, detecting all useful, i.e., considerably accurate, samples of an estimated ENF signal, and then applying an adapted normalized cross-correlation process that is designed for exploiting just the selected ENF portions based on a binary mask of the identified accurate samples. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides significantly increased performance.

Rolling bearings are key machine elements used in various fields such as automotive, machinery, aviation, and wind turbines. Over time, faults may occur in bearings due to variable operating speeds and loads, contamination, etc., and this may cause a severe reduction in performance. In the future, an undetected bearing fault can lead to a fatal breakdown and substantial economic losses or even human casualties. Thus, bearing early fault diagnosis emerges as a critical and up-to-date topic. It is possible to obtain vibration, acoustic, motor current, etc., data that contain crucial diagnostics information regarding the health conditions of mechanical systems with various sensor technologies. With the era of big data, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have started to be utilized frequently in industrial applications. In this regard, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are increasingly popular with their capability to capture fault information without expert knowledge. This paper deals with a bearing fault diagnosis method based on one-dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D CNN) using vibration data. A multi-class classification problem was solved by examining different operating conditions for three health classes. Therefore, healthy state, inner raceway, and outer raceway faults were detected under variable operating speeds (900 and 1500 rpm) and loads (0.1 and 0.7 Nm). The effectiveness of the proposed 1D CNN method was evaluated with the Paderborn University (PU) dataset. As a result, rolling bearing early fault diagnosis was performed with an accuracy of 93.97%. It was observed that the proposed method was suitable for bearing fault diagnosis and can be utilized to optimize the rotary machinery maintenance costs by early fault detection.

ENF (Electric Network Frequency) oscillates around a nominal value (50/60 Hz) due to imbalance between consumed and generated power. The intensity of a light source powered by mains electricity varies depending on the ENF fluctuations. These fluctuations can be extracted from videos recorded in the presence of mains-powered source illumination. This work investigates how the quality of the ENF signal estimated from video is affected by different light source illumination, compression ratios, and by social media encoding. Also explored is the effect of the length of the ENF ground-truth database on time of recording detection and verification.

Electric network frequency (ENF) is a time-varying signal of the frequency of mains electricity in a power grid. It continuously fluctuates around a nominal value (50/60 Hz) due to changes in the supply and demand of power over time. Depending on these ENF variations, the luminous intensity of a mains-powered light source also fluctuates. These fluctuations in luminance can be captured by video recordings. Accordingly, the ENF can be estimated from such videos by the analysis of steady content in the video scene. When videos are captured by using a rolling shutter sampling mechanism, as is done mostly with CMOS cameras, there is an idle period between successive frames. Consequently, a number of illumination samples of the scene are effectively lost due to the idle period. These missing samples affect the ENF estimation, in the sense of the frequency shift caused and the power attenuation that results. This paper develops an analytical model for videos captured using a rolling shutter mechanism. This model illustrates how the frequency of the main ENF harmonic varies depending on the idle period length, and how the power of the captured ENF attenuates as idle period increases. Based on this, a novel idle period estimation method for potential use in camera forensics that is able to operate independently of video frame rate is proposed. Finally, a novel time-of-recording verification approach based on the use of multiple ENF components, idle period assumptions, and the interpolation of missing ENF samples is also proposed.

Electrical network frequency (ENF) instantaneously fluctuates around its nominal value (50/60 Hz) due to a continuous disparity between generated power and consumed power. Consequently, luminous intensity of a mains-powered light source varies depending on ENF fluctuations in the grid network. Variations in the luminance over time can be captured from video recordings and ENF can be estimated through content analysis of these recordings. In ENF-based video forensics, it is critical to check whether a given video file is appropriate for this type of analysis. That is, if ENF signal is not present in a given video, it would be useless to apply ENF-based forensic analysis. In this letter, an ENF signal presence detection method is introduced for videos. The proposed method is based on multiple ENF signal estimations from steady superpixels, i.e., pixels that are most likely uniform in color, brightness, and texture, and intra-class similarity of the estimated signals. Subsequently, consistency among these estimates is then used to determine the presence or absence of an ENF signal in a given video. The proposed technique can operate on video clips as short as 2 min and is independent of the camera sensor type, i.e., CCD or CMOS.

The availability of sophisticated source attribution techniques raises new concerns about privacy and anonymity of photographers, activists, and human right defenders who need to stay anonymous while spreading their images and videos. Recently, the use of seam-carving, a content-aware resizing method, has been proposed to anonymize the source camera of images against the well-known photoresponse nonuniformity (PRNU)-based source attribution technique. In this paper, we provide an analysis of the seam-carving-based source camera anonymization method by determining the limits of its performance introducing two adversarial models. Our analysis shows that the effectiveness of the deanonymization attacks depend on various factors that include the parameters of the seam-carving method, strength of the PRNU noise pattern of the camera, and an adversary's ability to identify uncarved image blocks in a seam-carved image. Our results show that, for the general case, there should not be many uncarved blocks larger than the size of $50\times 50$ pixels for successful anonymization of the source camera.

Most work on steganalysis, except a few exceptions, have primarily focused on providing features with high discrimination power without giving due consideration to issues concerning practical deployment of steganalysis methods. In this work, we focus on machine learning aspect of steganalyzer design and utilize a hierarchical ensemble of classifiers based approach to tackle two main issues. Firstly, proposed approach provides a workable and systematic procedure to incorporate several steganalyzers together in a composite steganalyzer to improve detection performance in a scalable and cost-effective manner. Secondly, since the approach can be readily extended to multi-class classification it can also be used to infer the steganographic technique deployed in generation of a stego-object. We provide results to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach.

In this paper, a novel individual source scanner identification scheme is proposed. The scheme uses traces of dust, dirt, and scratches over scanner platen on scanned images to characterize a source scanner. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is substantiated with experimental analysis. The robustness of the scheme to the JPEG compression is also investigated. Experimental results show that proposed scheme could be used to match a scanned image to its source.

In this paper, we introduce tamper detection techniques based on artifacts created by color filter array (CFA) processing in most digital cameras. The techniques are based on computing a single feature and a simple threshold based classifier. The efficacy of the approach was tested over thousands of authentic, tampered, and computer generated images. Experimental results demonstrate reasonably low error rates.

The identification of image acquisition source is an important problem in digital image forensics. In this work, we focus on building a classifier to effectively distinguish between digital images taken from digital single lens reflex (DSLR) and compact cameras. Based on the architecture and the imaging features of DSLR and compact cameras, the images taken from different sources may have different statistical properties in both spatial and transform domains. In this work, we utilized wavelet coefficients and pixel noise statistics to model these two different source classes over 20 different digital cameras. The efficacy of the digital source class identifier, introduced in the paper, has been tested over 1000 high quality camera outputs and post-processed images (resized, re-compressed). Experimental analysis shows that the proposed method has good potential to distinguish DSLR and compact source classes.

Digital single lens reflex cameras suffer from a well-known sensor dust problem due to interchangeable lenses that they deploy. The dust particles that settle in front of the imaging sensor create a persistent pattern in all captured images. In this paper, we propose a novel source camera identification method based on detection and matching of these dust-spot characteristics. Dust spots in the image are detected based on a (Gaussian) intensity loss model and shape properties. To prevent false detections, lens parameter-dependent characteristics of dust spots are also taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the proposed detection scheme can be used in identification of the source digital single lens reflex camera at low false positive rates, even under heavy compression and downsampling.

Discrimination of computer generated images from real images is becoming more and more important. In this paper, we propose the use of new features to distinguish computer generated images from real images. The proposed features are based on the differences in the acquisition process of images. More specifically, traces of demosaicking and chromatic aberration are used to differentiate computer generated images from digital camera images. It is observed that the former features perform very well on high quality images, whereas the latter features perform consistently across a wide range of compression values. The experimental results show that proposed features are capable of improving the accuracy of the state-of-the-art techniques.

We develop a model to identify the most likely regions for users to click in order to create graphical passwords in the PassPoints system. A PassPoints password is a sequence of points, chosen by a user in an image that is displayed on the screen. Our model predicts probabilities of likely click points; this enables us to predict the entropy of a click point in a graphical password for a given image. The model allows us to evaluate automatically whether a given image is well suited for the PassPoints system, and to analyze possible dictionary attacks against the system. We compare the predictions provided by our model to results of experiments involving human users. At this stage, our model and the experiments are small and limited; but they show that user choice can be modeled and that expansions of the model and the experiments are a promising direction of research.

Perturbed quantization (PQ) data hiding is almost undetectable with the current steganalysis methods. We briefly describe PQ and propose singular value decomposition (SVD)-based features for the steganalysis of JPEG-based PQ data hiding in images. We show that JPEG-based PQ data hiding distorts linear dependencies of rows/columns of pixel values, and proposed features can be exploited within a simple classifier for the steganalysis of PQ. The proposed steganalyzer detects PQ embedding on relatively smooth stego images with 70% detection accuracy on average for different embedding rates.