RALEIGH, N.C. — Mobile phones have made it possible for the world to get on-the-scene video and photos from demonstrators confronting security forces throughout the Arab Spring, the last bloody moments of Moammar Gadhafi and the terror of the Virginia Tech shooting.
The dramatic images are part of the new world of citizen journalists, telling the world what’s happening when news crews are nowhere around. But how do we know they’re true?
Now researchers at Duke University and Microsoft Research say they’ve developed a prototype of a feature mobile phone manufacturers can use that reveals if photos, video or audio data has been altered.
“It’s a way for people to post images on the web anonymously while allowing people who view those images to know that they are authentic,” Duke computer scientist Landon Cox said.
Cox described the function researchers call YouProve at a recent industry conference in Seattle. YouProve allows phone owners to upload images or sound anonymously, but the package of data also will reflect if anything’s been changed, much like an erasure smudge on a paper page. An accompanying image reader shows the smudges on the video, photo or audio clip.
“That report can tell somebody looking at the modified image which regions of the image are exactly the same and which have changed in some way,” Cox said. “”You get to see which parts of the image have changed, although you don’t necessarily know the way that they changed. For example, if somebody wants to protect the anonymity of a person in a photo and they blur out the person’s face, YouProve will tell you that the only part of the image that changed was that blurred face, but it won’t tell you anything about what was there before it was blurred.”
The feature could have commercial uses for things like environmental monitoring, traffic updates, or anything else that depends on verifying the authenticity of a GPS coordinate, Cox said.
For example, a service that promises to tell commuters where they can find an open parking spot right now could be based around YouProve, Cox said.
“There are lots of services that are on the horizon that would benefit from having stronger guarantees about how authentic the data coming from a mobile device really is,” Cox said.
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