Information Theoretical Limit of Media Forensics: The Forensicability

—While more and more forensic techniques have been proposed to detect the processing history of multimedia content, one starts to wonder if there exists a fundamental limit on the capability of forensics. In other words, besides keeping on searching what investigators can do, it is also important to find out the limit of their capability and what they cannot do. In this paper, we explore the fundamental limit of operation forensics by proposing an information theoretical framework. In particular, we consider a general forensic system of estimating operations’ hypotheses based on extracted features from the multimedia content. In this system, forensicability is defined as the maximum forensic information that features contain about operations. Then, due to its conceptual similarity with mutual information in an information theory, forensicability is measured as the mutual information between features and operations’ hypotheses. Such a measurement gives the error probability lowe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: TIFS
• Authors: Xiaoyu Chu, Yan Chen, Matthew C. Stamm, K. J. Ray Liu
• Keywords: TIFS 2016