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Jessica Fridrich and her team, at the State University of New York in Binghamton, are
working on perfect their invention. A tool that could help put away child pornographers.
Its new software that reliably links digital images to the camera that took them, just
like weapons no two digital cameras are exactly alike, not even the same model from the same
brand.
Every camera has a fingerprint, it’s like every person has a unique fingerprint. Much
like forensic investigators matching a bullet to the gun that fired it, the digital camera’s
fingerprint can match the photograph to its taker. Here’s how it works, manual cameras
have film, but a digital camera contains a digital imagining sensor. Each sensor has
millions of small pixels that due to the manufacturing process are unique. The more they’ve got
pixels then the easier it is to identify the camera. The variations in pixels lead to the
variations in the color in the digital pictures.
Even a piece of blue sky is not completely blue, but there are very small variations
the different shades of blue and they start resembling like a noise. That noise becomes
the basis for the digital fingerprint. So far we have analyzed about eleven cameras
and we tested over three thousand images. In every case, we were able to identify, correctly
identify the picture.
The FBI in the process of evaluating this technology as an investigative tool declined
our request for an interview. This technique has yet to be tested in a court of law and
Dr. Fridrich is still trying to patent her software. But for those in the business of
nailing child pornographers this technology can’t come soon enough.