Police find way to trace cameras of incriminating photos

POLICE have developed a way to catch online criminals by tracing the hidden clues left on incriminating digital photos.

This is no magic eye, but image noise like this can provide magic clues to where it came

THERE’S a trick hidden in digital photos that police are using to help bust online criminals.

Investigators have found that tiny variations in the silicon chip-based camera sensors create a signature on each shot allowing a way to track particular photographs to the very camera that took them.

In a report by Scientific American it states how this development might provide the basis for a forensic method of catching pedophiles who distribute child pornography anonymously on the internet.

The signature is essentially a noise pattern (a fuzzy array of pixels) left on every photo and “It is not currently possible to perfectly separate the image noise and modify it” according to Riccardo Satta, a scientific officer at the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen.

This is no magic eye, but image noise like this can provide magic clues to where it came from.

Satta tested out this method in a study that took 2,896 images from 15 different social networks and blog accounts and found he could group them to the originating camera 90 per cent of the time.

Despite the success rate, it is not high enough to currently use at trial but the technique could help identify targets for police to investigate further.

This photographic signature is not the first known to police with digital cameras inserting other identifiers in the form of streams of light but none have been as reliable as tracing the source than the sensor-pattern noise.