Alessandro Bruno

Copy–Move Forgery Detection by Matching Triangles of Keypoints

Copy-move forgery is one of the most common types of tampering for digital images. Detection methods generally use block-matching approaches, which first divide the image into overlapping blocks and then extract and compare features to find similar ones, or point-based approaches, in which relevant keypoints are extracted and matched to each other to find similar areas. In this paper, we present a very novel hybrid approach, which compares triangles rather than blocks, or single points. Interest points are extracted from the image, and objects are modeled as a set of connected triangles built onto these points. Triangles are matched according to their shapes (inner angles), their content (color information), and the local feature vectors extracted onto the vertices of the triangles. Our methods are designed to be robust to geometric transformations. Results are compared with a state-of-the-art block matching method and a point-based method. Furthermore, our data set is available for use by academic researchers.

Detecting multiple copies in tampered images

Copy-move forgeries are parts of the image that are duplicated elsewhere into the same image, often after being modified by geometrical transformations. In this paper we present a method to detect these image alterations, using a SIFT-based approach. First we describe a state of the art SIFT-point matching method, which inspired our algorithm, then we compare it with our SIFT-based approach, which consists of three parts: keypoint clustering, cluster matching, and texture analysis. The goal is to find copies of the same object, i.e. clusters of points, rather than points that match. Cluster matching proves to give better results than single point matching, since it returns a complete and coherent comparison between copied objects. At last, textures of matching areas are analyzed and compared to validate results and to eliminate false positives.

Copy-move forgery detection via texture description

Copy-move forgery is one of the most common type of tampering in digital images. Copy-moves are parts of the image that are copied and pasted onto another part of the same image. Detection methods in general use block-matching methods, which first divide the image into overlapping blocks and then extract features from each block, assuming similar blocks will yield similar features. In this paper we present a block-based approach which exploits texture as feature to be extracted from blocks. Our goal is to study if texture is well suited for the specific application, and to compare performance of several texture descriptors. Tests have been made on both uncompressed and JPEG compressed images.

Visual saliency by keypoints distribution analysis

In this paper we introduce a new method for Visual Saliency detection. The goal of our method is to emphasize regions that show rare visual aspects in comparison with those showing frequent ones. We propose a bottom up approach that performs a new technique based on low level image features (texture) analysis. More precisely, we use SIFT Density Maps (SDM), to study the distribution of keypoints into the image with different scales of observation, and its relationship with real fixation points. The hypothesis is that the image regions that show a larger distance from the mode (most frequent value) of the keypoints distribution over all the image are the same that better capture our visual attention. Results have been compared to two other low-level approaches and a supervised method.

Saliency Based Image Cropping

Image cropping is a technique that is used to select the most relevant areas of an image, discarding the useless ones. Handmade selection, especially in case of large photo collections, is a time consuming task. Automatic image cropping techniques may help users, suggesting to them which part of the image is the most relevant, according to specific criteria. We suppose that the most visually salient areas of a photo are also the most relevant ones to the users. In this paper we present an extended version of our previously proposed method, to extract the saliency map of an image, which is based on the analysis of the distribution of the interest points of the image. Three different interest point extraction algorithms are evaluated within an automatic image cropping system, to study the effectiveness of the related saliency maps for this task. We furthermore compared our results with two state of the art saliency detection techniques. Tests have been conducted onto an online available dataset, made of 5000 images which have been manually labeled by 9 users.

Video Object Recognition and Modeling by SIFT Matching Optimization

In this paper we present a novel technique for object modeling and object recognition in video. Given a set of videos containing 360 degrees views of objects we compute a model for each object, then we analyze short videos to determine if the object depicted in the video is one of the modeled objects. The object model is built from a video spanning a 360 degree view of the object taken against a uniform background. In order to create the object model, the proposed techniques selects a few representative frames from each video and local features of such frames. The object recognition is performed selecting a few frames from the query video, extracting local features from each frame and looking for matches in all the representative frames constituting the models of all the objects. If the number of matches exceed a fixed threshold the corresponding object is considered the recognized objects .To evaluate our approach we acquired a dataset of 25 videos representing 25 different objects and used these videos to build the objects model. Then we took 25 test videos containing only one of the known objects and 5 videos containing only unknown objects. Experiments showed that despite a significant compression in the model recognition results are satisfactory.

Palmprint principal lines extraction

The palmprint recognition has become a focus in biological recognition and image processing fields. In this process, the features extraction (with particular attention to palmprint principal line extraction) is especially important. Although a lot of work has been reported, the representation of palmprint is still an open issue. In this paper we propose a simple, efficient, and accurate palmprint principal lines extraction method. Our approach consists of six simple steps: normalization, median filtering, average filters along four prefixed directions, grayscale bottom-hat filtering, combination of bottom-hat filtering, binarization and post processing. The contribution of our work is a new method for palmprint principal lines detection and a new dataset of hand labeled principal lines images (that we use as ground truth in the experiments). Preliminary experimental results showed good performance in terms of accuracy with respect to three methods of the state of the art.

Object Recognition and Modeling Using SIFT Features

In this paper we present a technique for object recognition and modelling based on local image features matching. Given a complete set of views of an object the goal of our technique is the recognition of the same object in an image of a cluttered environment containing the object and an estimate of its pose. The method is based on visual modeling of objects from a multi-view representation of the object to recognize. The first step consists of creating object model, selecting a subset of the available views using SIFT descriptors to evaluate image similarity and relevance. The selected views are then assumed as the model of the object and we show that they can effectively be used to visually represent the main aspects of the object. Recognition is done making comparison between the image containing an object in generic position and the views selected as object models. Once an object has been recognized the pose can be estimated searching the complete set of views of the object. Experimental results are very encouraging using both a private dataset we acquired in our lab and a publicly available dataset.

A Low Cost Solution for NOAA Remote Sensing.

United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites adopt Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors to acquire remote sensing data and broadcast Automatic Picture Transmission (APT) images. The orientation of the scan lines is perpendicular to the orbit of the satellite. In this paper we propose a new low cost solution for NOAA remote sensing. More in detail, our method focuses on the possibility of directly sampling the modulated signal and processing it entirely in software enabled by recent breakthroughs on Software Defined Radios (SDR) and CPU computational speed, while keeping the costs extremely low. We aim to achieve good results with inexpensive SDR hardware, like the RTL-SDR (a repurposed DVB-T USB dongle). Nevertheless, we faced some problems caused by hardware limits such as high receiver noise figure and low ADC resolution. Furthermore, we detected several inherent drawbacks of frequent tuner saturations. For this purpose we developed a software-hardware integrated system able to perform the following steps: satellite pass prediction, time scheduling, signal demodulation, image cropping and filtering. Although we employed low cost components, we obtained good results in terms of signal demodulation, synchronization and image reconstruction.

Exploiting Visual Saliency Algorithms for Object-Based Attention: A New Color and Scale-Based Approach

Visual Saliency aims to detect the most important regions of an image from a perceptual point of view. More in detail, the goal of Visual Saliency is to build a Saliency Map revealing the salient subset of a given image by analyzing bottom-up and top-down factors of Visual Attention. In this paper we proposed a new method for Saliency detection based on colour and scale analysis, extending our previous work based on SIFT spatial density inspection. We conducted several experiments to study the relationships between saliency methods and the object attention processes and we collected experimental data by tracking the eye movements of thirty viewers in the first three seconds of observation of several images. More precisely, we used a dataset that consists of images with an object in the foreground on an homogeneous background. We are interested in studying the performance of our saliency method with respect to the real fixation maps collected during the experiments. We compared the performances of our method with several state of the art methods with very encouraging results.