Introduction

ToothPic is a breakthrough camera identification technology based on a novel compressed fingerprint format. It enables the deployment of camera-identification services on an unprecedented scale, paving the way for application to popular image sharing and social media sites.

Technical features

The continuously growing amount of photos posted and distributed over the Internet poses several important problems related to improper use of images, such as exploiting them for commercial purposes, re-posting others’ photos without consent or infringing copyright, posting photos containing unethical or illegal contents, and so forth. Camera identification, which refers to identify which digital imaging sensor has shot a given picture, exploiting the fact that each sensor leaves a unique fingerprint in all pictures, is a key ingredient in the solution to the aforementioned problems. This methodology is based on the random projection technique, in particular real valued or quantized random projections.

Possible Applications

• To find posted pictures on social media, shot by a given camera;
• To automatically check posted photographs for identifying improper use;
• To automatically find pictures published by web sites without photographer consent;
• To obtain information regarding to pictures related to unlawful behavior;
• “Easy-to-use” 2-step authentication based on camera identification.

Advantages

• Deployment of camera identification services on an unprecedented scale;
• Compact and flexible representation of the sensor fingerprint;
• High compression ratios allowing the storage of millions of camera identities;
• Resilience to common image transformations;
• Outperform state of the art methods by orders of magnitude.