Amped Software co-authored a scientific paper, this time about detecting double encoding in HEIF images. Read the paper, it’s open access!
Dear friends, we’re glad to share some good news with you! We’ve just co-authored a paper published in Sensors about the forensic analysis of HEIF files, specifically to detect double HEIC (High-Efficiency Image Coding) compression. Indeed, the HEIF format is becoming ubiquitous thanks to its superior encoding capabilities compared to JPEG. However, academic researchers have dedicated little attention to this topic so far.
We decided it was time to get the ball rolling. We partnered with Prof. Alessandro Piva and his Ph.D. student Yoshihisa Furushita from the University of Florence and Prof. Giovanni Ramponi from the University of Trieste.
About Double Encoding Detection
For those unfamiliar with the field, double encoding detection determines whether a given media has been compressed once or twice. At first glance, you may think this is not an exciting task, but it is for two reasons. First, you expect camera-original images to be compressed only once during acquisition. If more compression steps are found, the image integrity is likely broken. Second, this task is often a preliminary step for performing forgery localization, similar to how it is used in JPEG analysis.
After over one year of research, we’re very glad our work is available to the community! The paper provides details of the method and presents its performance through a sizeable experimental validation. Additionally, it is an excellent resource for those interested in approaching forensic analysis of this image format.
The topping on the cake is that the paper is open-access so that everyone can read it for free. Get in touch with us if you have any questions or comments!
