Professor Jay Kuo has joined an international team led by Professor Ed Delp of Purdue University to develop a system for military intelligence that would detect doctored images and video and determine specifically how they were manipulated.

A huge volume of images and video of potential intelligence value are uploaded daily to the Internet. However, visual media are easily manipulated using software tools that are readily available to the public. The researchers will strive to create an “end-to-end” system capable of handling the massive volume of media uploaded regularly to the Internet. Such a system also could have potential commercial applications, representing a potential tool for news and social media platforms to authenticate images and video before posting them.

The project is funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The team’s co-principal investigators are Walter Scheirer, Kevin W. Bowyer, and Patrick J. Flynn from the University of Notre Dame; Anderson Rocha from the University of Campinas in Brazil; C.-C. Jay Kuo from the University of Southern California; Paolo Bestagini and Stefano Tubaro at Politecnico di Milano in Italy; Mauro Barni at the University of Siena in Italy; and Nasir Memon at New York University.